Peter Hargitai – författare

The two-volume compilation of readings in Hungarian exilic literature is a selective guide through the genres of a body of work that until recently was all but inaccessible to English readers, specialist and student alike. These voices from the “other Europe” add a unique and invaluable chord to our appreciation of global diversity by broadening the definition of exile beyond geographical dislocation to questions of identity provoked by political, cultural, psychological and spiritual displacement.Volume Two: Translations from the Hungarian Exilic Experience showcases award-winning English translations of two 20th Century Hungarian literary giants who were forced into a life of exile in their own country—the poet Attila József (1905–1937) and the literary historian and novelist Antal Szerb (1901–1945) who was executed in 1945. Included in the volume is the work of Hungarian-American poet Ferenc Mózsi (1947–2007), the most innovative poet of his generation, who risked his life in a daring escape from communist Hungary only to have his poems suffer rejection in both mainstream America and in his native Hungary.

The two-volume compilation of readings in Hungarian exilic literature is a selective guide through the genres of a body of work that until recently was all but inaccessible to English readers, specialist and student alike. These voices from the “other Europe” add a unique and invaluable chord to our appreciation of global diversity by broadening the definition of exile beyond geographical dislocation to questions of identity provoked by political, cultural, psychological and spiritual displacement.Volume One: Readings from the Hungarian Exilic Experience is a collection of award-winning poetry, short fiction, non-fiction, drama, and a trilogy of novels as seen through the eyes of a hyphenated everyman-in-exile, whose journey transcends his condition as a perpetual outsider condemned to anonymity in a world that is both familiar and strange, twistedly funny and at the same time heart-wrenching, uniquely Hungarian and uniquely American, and more importantly, movingly human.