Traveler and the Moonlight

Traveler and the Moonlight by Antal Szerb and translated from the Hungarian by Peter Hargitai recounts the misadventures of a closeted intellectual forced to fit into a life of conventional morality and its notions of manhood. Thirty-six-year-old Mihály takes his new bride to Italy for their honeymoon, where chance separates them, and he finds himself on the run from his marriage. Wandering aimlessly from Perugia to Rome, he begins a break-though journey of fatally erotic longing that culminates on the edge of an abyss too dark to contemplate. Set in Europe during the rise of Fascism, his visionary states are eerily prophetic about one of the darkest periods in human history and of the author's own doom.




PRAISE: "A Hungarian Classic, Beautifully Translated."
- Robert Zaller, Distinguished Professor of History
Elected Fellow to the Royal Historical Society



"Peter Hargitai, a distinguished translator and author in his own right, has given three decades of his life to Szerb and his novel, and the present translation is a revision of the one originally published in 1994. It is a labor of love that well rewards the reader, supple and idiomatic and faithful at all times to the turns - and the high eloquence too - of Szerb's masterful voice."
- Hungarian Studies Vol. 30 No. 2 Akadémia Kiadó


"The Traveler's American translator, Peter Hargitai, has written an interesting Afterword in which he reveals some of the 'secrets' of the novel. There is the double lure of androgynous love and sudden death."
- George Gömöri
World Literature Today



"I hope the Traveler reaches thousands and thousands of readers."
-Elie Wiesel
Distinguished Nobel Laureate



"Fine, ambitious, subtle, with something of Thomas Mann in it. The Traveler heads for the depths ... One thing that especially moved me is this idea: The Woman needs to rescue herself from being sold from man to man, and the man needs to rescue himself from being sold to death."
-Robert Bly
American Poet


"It is remarkable and sad that this fine Kafkaesque Hungarian novel has taken over half a century to reach readers, but in Mr. Hargitai's inspired translation, at once spare and poetic, they will be serve well. Antal Szerb's dark, and at times mordantly humorous, tale of androgyny and fatal human relationships trips the pulse with its intricate twists of plot and the mind with its philosophical nuances It easily stands in company with Kafka, Rilke, Walser, and other Middle European masters of the early part of the 20th Century who were precursors of modernism and prophets of the frozen sea."
-Laurence Donovan
University of Miami