IBNA- Epic trilogy novel 'The Sleepwalkers' (1931) by Modernist Austrian author ‎Hermann Broch has been rendered into Persian by veteran translator Ali-Asghar ‎Haddad and is going to be published.‎

Haddad who has translated several works from German-language literary icons such as Thomas Mann, Peter Handke and Günter Grass told IBNA: “The 800 pages novel is a key work of world literature as some have compared it to ‘Ulysses’ by James Joyce. Having a philosophical theme, 'The Sleepwalkers' follows the process of European values dissolution from Renaissance to the years after World War I.”
 
With ‘The Sleepwalkers’, Hermann Broch established himself as one of the great innovators of modern literature, a visionary writer-philosopher the equal of James Joyce, Thomas Mann, or Robert Musil. Even as he grounded his narratives in the intimate daily life of Germany, Broch was identifying the oceanic changes that would shortly sweep that life into the abyss.
 
Whether he is writing about a neurotic army officer The Romantic, a disgruntled bookkeeper and would-be assassin The Anarchist, or an opportunistic war-deserter The Realist, Broch immerses himself in the twists of his characters' psyches, and at the same time soars above them, to produce a prophetic portrait of a world tormented by its loss of faith, morals, and reason.
 
Broch was born in Vienna to a prosperous Jewish family and worked for some time in his family's factory in Teesdorf. He started as a full-time writer when he was 40. When ‘The sleepwalkers’, his first novel, was published, he was 45. In 1945 was published his masterpiece, ‘The Dead of Virgil’. After this, he started an essay on mass behavior, which remained unfinished. He was also nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature.