TEHRAN-The Persian translation of the novel “Journey by Moonlight” written by the Hungarian author Antal Szerb has been released in the bookstores across Iran.

Farnaz Haeri has translated the book into Persian and Now Publications has published the book, Mehr reported.

First published in Hungary in 1937, Szerb's book is the consummate European novel of the inter-war period.

A major classic of 1930s literature, the book is the fantastically moving and darkly funny story of a bourgeois businessman torn between duty and desire.

In the book, Mihály has dreamt of Italy all his life. When he finally travels there on his honeymoon with his wife Erszi, he soon abandons her in order to find himself, haunted by old friends from his turbulent teenage days: beautiful, kind Tamas, brash and wicked Janos, and unforgettable Eva. Journeying from Venice to Ravenna, Florence, and Rome, Mihály loses himself in Venetian back alleys and in the Tuscan and Umbrian countryside, driven by an irresistible desire to resurrect his lost youth among Hungary's Bright Young Things, and knowing that he must soon decide whether to return to the ambiguous promise of a placid adult life or allow himself to be seduced into a life of scandalous adventure.

“Journey by Moonlight” is an undoubted masterpiece of Modernist literature, a darkly comic novel cut through by desire and death, which traces the effects of a socially and sensually claustrophobic world on the life of one man.

Antal Szerb (1901-1945) was a noted Hungarian scholar and writer. He is generally considered to be one of the major Hungarian writers of the 20th century.

As a student, he published essays on Georg Trakl and Stefan George, and quickly established a formidable reputation as a scholar, writing erudite studies of William Blake and Henrik Ibsen among other works. Elected President of the Hungarian Literary Academy in 1933 - aged just 32 -, he published his first novel, “The Pendragon Legend” (which draws upon his personal experience of living in Britain) the following year.

His second and best-known work “Journey by Moonlight” came out in 1937. He was made a Professor of Literature at the University of Szeged the same year. He was twice awarded the Baumgarten Prize, in 1935 and 1937.

In 1941 he published a History of World Literature which continues to be authoritative today. He also published a volume on novel theory and a book about the history of Hungarian literature. Given numerous chances to escape antisemitic persecution (as late as 1944), he chose to remain in Hungary, where his last novel, a Pirandellian fantasy about a king staging a coup against himself, then having to impersonate himself, Oliver VII, was published in 1942. It was passed off as a translation from English, as no Jewish work could have been printed at the time.

Szerb was deported to a concentration camp late in 1944 and was beaten to death there in January 1945, at the age of 43.

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