Peter Hargitai

Hargitai may have vacillated between prose and poetry, but he did not abandon poetry altogether, publishing Witch's Island and Other Poems in 2013. His signature poem, “Mother’s Visit No. 29” was included in the anthology Sixty Years of American Poetry, and his poem “Mother’s a Racist” won the 2009 Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Poetry Prize. His translation of Attila József was listed by Yale critic Harold Bloom in his The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages. Hargitai was also a contributing writer to the anthology "Fodor's Budget Zion", a collection of poetry and prose. Peter Hargitai was appointed the first poet laureate of Gulfport, Florida in 2015.

After returning from Europe, Hargitai obtained a teaching position at Florida International University in Miami where he was to work until his retirement in 2012. While at FIU, he published a collection of original poems in Mother Tongue: A Broken Hungarian Love Song, a volume of short stories, Budapest to Bellevue, a collection of folk tales titled Magyar Tales, three novels (Attila, Millie, and Daughter of the Revolution), and a two volume textbook about the Hungarian exile experience.

In 1988 under a grant from the Fulbright-Hayes Foundation he was able to spend time in Hungary and Italy translating Antal Szerb’s 1937 novel The Traveler and the Moonlight. At the request of the author’s widow he did not publish his English version (The Traveler) until after her death in 1994. For this effort, the first translation in the English language, he was presented with the Füst Milán Award from the Hungarian Academy of Arts and Sciences.

In 1978, Hargitai secured a position at the University of Miami teaching Composition and introductory courses in English and American literatures; the early 80's saw him turning his attention once again to Attila József, and he continued publishing individual poems although a collection did not come together until Perched on Nothing's Branch, released by Apalachee Press in 1987. The short volume won the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets. In her citation for the Academy in 1988, May Swenson praised the translations as “grim, bitter, iron-clad emerging technically strong and admirably contemporary in syntax.”

In 1969, Hargitai started teaching English at St. Clement school in a Cleveland suburb, followed by assignments at St. Boniface, Mentor High, and two evenings a week at Telshe Yeshiva Rabbinical School. He founded the Poetry Forum Program after being awarded a grant from the Martha-Holden Jennings Foundation so local poets could work side by side with students, their combined efforts culminating in a regional collection with the title Forum:Ten Poets of the Western Reserve published in 1976. The collection which Hargitai edited with Lolette Kuby was introduced by Paul Engle and featured, among others, Robert Wallace, Alberta Turner, Hale Chatfield, Russell Atkins, and Grace Butcher, alongside student poets. Hargitai's passion for a literary career took a serious turn when he discovered and translated the poems of the modern Hungarian poet Attila József (1905-1937).

Hargitai was born in Budapest, Hungary. At the age of nine he wrote his first poem “Rebels” meant as a tribute to the failed 1956 Hungarian Revolution. After a daring escape, he arrived in America with his father, a royal judge before the Soviet occupation, his mother, and two brothers. Poems in his adopted language did not come until his university studies in Cleveland between 1965 and 1975 when he contributed occasional poems to the Frigate and the Dark Tower, two literary magazines connected with Cleveland State University. Hargitai was twenty when he married Dianne Kress; they have two children.

Peter Hargitai (born 1947 Budapest, Hungary) is a poet, novelist, and translator of Hungarian literature.