Approaching My Literature, Volume 2

Peter Hargitai is a Senior Lecturer in English at Florida International University. He has been teaching Writing, Rhetoric and Literature for four decades. As a poet, author and translator, he has garnered numerous literary awards including the Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets, the Füst Milán Award from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and the Pro Cultura Hungarica Medal from the Republic of Hungary. He is a member of PEN (Writers in Exile).

Peter Hargitai's translation of the Hungarian poet Attila Józef's verse in Perched on Nothing's Branch is a book selection in The Western Canon (The Chaotic Age: A Canonical Prophecy)." —Harold Bloom, Sterling Professor of Humanities, Yale University"These grim, bitter, iron-clad poems emerge technically strong, spare and authentic in English, and they are admirably contemporary in syntax." —May Swenson, in her citation for the Academy of American Poets"I have long thought of Attila József as one of the great poets of the century, a tragic realist whose work beautifully redeemed the unbearable conditions of the life to which history condemned him. These new translations by Peter Hargitai, so faithful, so readable, will be welcomed by József's admirers and certainly add to their number." —Donald Justice, Pulitzer Prize–winning poet"Elegant, erudite, a classic in the Eastern European literature of ideas. Szerb's prose resonates with the heightened language of the era, yet it is so readable, so whimsical in its stylistic energy. A delicacy. The original found a match in Peter Hargitai's sophisticated, faithful yet imaginative translation." —Asher Z. Milbauer, Director, The Exile Studies Certificate Program, Florida International University