# Half-Understood Things — Antal Szerb in translation
# https://antalszerb.com/

English translations of uncollected essays and criticism by Antal Szerb
(1901–1945), Hungarian novelist, literary historian, and critic. Produced by
Rachel Edwards, paragraph by paragraph, with Hungarian source text and full
editorial annotations throughout.

Original Hungarian texts are in the public domain (Szerb died January 1945).
Translations © Rachel Edwards. Please attribute translations to Rachel Edwards
and the underlying works to Antal Szerb.

Contact: hello@antalszerb.com

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## Essays

### Books and Youth: An Elegy
Hungarian title: Könyvek és ifjúság elégiája
Published: Nyugat, vol. 10, 1938
URL: https://antalszerb.com/essay/books-and-youth/
Status: All 40 paragraphs translated; 20 editorially finalised, the remainder
        awaiting editorial revision.

Szerb reflects on the books that shaped his adolescence and laments the paucity
of exciting new art movements in the late 1930s. The essay takes the form of a
literary letter to an unnamed intellectual friend abroad. Quotations appear from
Keats, Blake, Baudelaire, Proust, and others; allusions to Nietzsche, Huxley,
Dante, Gide, and Mann.

### The Magician Breaks His Staff
Hungarian title: A varázsló eltöri pálcáját
Published: Új Idők, 1940
URL: https://antalszerb.com/essay/magician-breaks-his-staff/
Status: Complete — all 9 paragraphs translated and editorially finalised.

A meditation on the enigma of Shakespeare's old age: his retirement to
Stratford, his apparent indifference to the fate of his plays, and Prospero
breaking his staff in The Tempest as a figure for the artist laying down his
art. Draws on Arany János, Voltaire's Candide, and Taine.

### The Sickness of the Century
Hungarian title: A század betegsége
Published: in the collection A varázsló eltöri pálcáját (1948)
URL: https://antalszerb.com/essay/sickness-of-the-century/
Status: Complete — all 8 paragraphs translated and editorially finalised.

A short, ironic essay on the Romantic mal du siècle, with Lord Byron as its
archetype — his cult, his cultivated unhappiness (the Thorvaldsen bust
anecdote), and Szerb's turn: the anxious modern age of 1940 has been cured of
world-sorrow because it can no longer afford the leisure to feel it. Quotes
Macaulay's essay on Byron.

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## About Antal Szerb

URL: https://antalszerb.com/
Books (English translations and untranslated works): https://antalszerb.com/books/
Wikidata: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q912070
VIAF: https://viaf.org/viaf/67283900

Szerb was born in Budapest in 1901. He is known in English for his novel
Journey by Moonlight (Utas és holdvilág, 1937) and his History of World
Literature (A világirodalom története, 1941), both published by Pushkin Press.
His essays and shorter criticism remain almost entirely untranslated. He was
murdered in a forced labour camp at Balf in January 1945, aged forty-three.