Journey by Moonlight
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AT THE AMERICAN ARCHAEOLOGICAL SOCIETY’S GARDEN PARTY IN ROME They sang clearly on the other side of the wall, men probably, a keening chant unlike anything else, in which certain distinct yet nonsensical words returned with a rhythmic insistence. A deep and tragic note ran through the melody, not a human voice so much, but beyond that, more like an animal howl in the night, an ancient cry of pain, left over from the age of balsam, from the age of trees. Mihály sat down, leaned against the balsam tree and closed his eyes. These were not men’s voices from the other side but the voices of women, and already they were passing in front of him in a curious cast, reminding him of the surreal world of Nakonxipan in a Gulácsy painting, its haunting figures dressed in flowing lilac-hued vestments, and it occurred to him that they were mourning the gods, Attis, Adonis … and Tamás Ulpius, his dear friend Tamás, who had to die unmourned, who lay in state now since the beginning of time, over whose pale features day was breaking on the other side of the wall.
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About the Book
Journey by Moonlight by Antal Szerb (1937-1945) 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-through 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.
About the Author
Antal Szerb (1901–1945) was a Hungarian literary scholar and novelist. His 1937 novel Utas és holdvilág, variously translated as The Traveler (1994), Journey by Moonlight (2001), and Traveler and the Moonlight (2016), endures as a pioneering contribution to the modernist literary canon. Hargitai’s Journey by Moonlight celebrates its first English-language publication and honors the memory of Antal Szerb whose life was cut short in a Nazi labor camp. Three months before the war’s end, on January 27, 1945, his guards beat him to death and tossed him into an anonymous mass grave. It would take fifty years for his name to appear on a memorial when the novel’s American translator and his university students had the name of Antal Szerb inscribed into the Holocaust Memorial wall in the City of Miami Beach.