Half-Understood Things — Antal Szerb in translation
Latest essay The Sickness of the Century Thorvaldsen was surprised to see Byron seat himself before him in some quite peculiar, dramatic pose. He asked him merely to be as he usually was. ‘But this is how I am!’ cried Byron, affronted. And when the bust was finished, it did not please him. ‘It is no good,’ he said; ‘I am far more unhappy than that.’
Antal Szerb (1901–1945) was a Hungarian scholar and novelist.
His greatest novel, the peculiar and melancholy Journey by Moonlight (1937), has been much praised by reviewers, and in recent years all of his novels have been published in English.
Szerb was also a prolific essayist and literary critic, but only a handful of his essays have been translated into English. Half-Understood Things publishes his essays in new translations, one at a time, alongside the Hungarian original.
Books and Youth: An Elegy At the time I understood the foreign poets only very imperfectly, but that only heightened their enchantment. Of youth one ought to say with a sigh: ‘O, to read Baudelaire once more as I did at eighteen!’ It meant more than first love. 
The Magician Breaks His Staff This is the most baffling thing about Shakespeare: this withdrawal, this inexplicable conclusion. How can it be that a poet — and a Shakespeare, no less! — should be able to cut himself off so utterly from that which had been the glorious meaning of his life?