TEHRAN-The Persian translation of the 1976 novella “Youth Without Youth” written by Romanian author Mircea Eliade has been released in bookstores across Iran.

Reza Dehghan has translated the book and Mahi Publication has brought it out in 157 pages, ISNA reported.

The story follows the life of Dominic Matei, an elderly Romanian intellectual who experiences a cataclysmic event that allows him to live a new life with startling intellectual capacity.

Bucharest, 1938: While Hitler gains power in Germany, the Romanian police start arresting students they suspect of belonging to the Iron Guard.  Meanwhile, a man who has spent his life studying languages, poetry, and history—a man who thought his life was over—lies in a hospital bed, inexplicably alive and miraculously healthy, trying to figure out how to conceal his identity.

At the intersection of the natural and supernatural, myth and history, dream and science, lies Mircea Eliade’s novella.  Now in its first paperback edition, the psychological thriller features Dominic Matei, an elderly academic who experiences a cataclysmic event that allows him to live a new life with startling intellectual capacity. Sought by the Nazis for their medical experiments on the potentially life-prolonging power of electric shocks, Matei is helped to flee through Romania, Switzerland, Malta and India. Newly endowed with prodigious powers of memory and comprehension, he finds himself face to face with the glory and terror of the supernatural.  In this surreal, philosophy-driven fantasy, Eliade tests the boundaries of the literary genre as well as the reader’s imagination.

Suspenseful, witty, and poignant, “Youth Without Youth” illuminates Eliade’s longing for past loves and new texts, his imagination, and his love of a thrilling mystery.  It was adapted for the screen in 2007 as Francis Ford Coppola’s first feature film in over ten years, starring Tim Roth, Bruno Ganz, Alexandra Maria Lara, André Hennicke, Marcel Iureș, and Adrian Pintea.

Mircea Eliade (1907-1986) was a Romanian-born historian of religion, fiction writer, philosopher, professor at the University of Chicago, and one of the pre-eminent interpreters of world religion in the last century. 

He was an intensely prolific author of fiction and non-fiction alike, publishing over 1,300 pieces over 60 years. He earned international fame with “The Myth of the Eternal Return” (1949), an interpretation of religious symbols and imagery. Eliade was much interested in the world of the unconscious. 

SS/SAB