Peter Hargitai

Life

Peter Hargitai (1947– ) 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, and soon two children followed. While he was working for a Master of Arts in English, he supported his family through a series of bizarre jobs which included a stint at the Cleveland Zoo where he cleaned orangutan cages.

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). 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. Despite this grueling schedule, 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.

In 1978 Hargitai and his family left Cleveland for Florida where he 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, hailed by such poets as Donald Justice and May Swenson, won the prestigious Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets. In her citation for the Academy in 1988, Swenson praised the translations as “grim, bitter, iron-clad emerging technically strong and admirably contemporary in syntax.”

Hargitai’s own poetry, having been intentionally placed on the back burner behind his translations, started to find a home in literary magazines like the California Quarterly in which his poem “Mother’s Visit No. 29” tied for third place with a poem by the well-known poet David Kirby.

While lecturing at the University of Miami, Hargitai took a fiction writing course from Isaac Bashevis Singer. The experience with the Nobel Laureate proved to be profound and genre changing; under Singer’s tutelage, he became not only an enthusiastic student of short fiction but the Nobel Laureate’s personal chauffeur from the Coral Gables campus to his Surfside condominium: Hargitai found himself drawn to the short story, and he started publishing his stories in respectable journals on both sides of the Atlantic. One of Singer’s favorite Hargitai stories, “Zoltán Muhari,” published in Inlet and picked up by the Hungarian literary periodical Szivárvány, is part of the late Nobel Laureate’s permanent archives at the University of Texas. Hargitai re-enrolled in graduate school, this time in New England and embarked on an ambitious work of fiction, a trilogy, which he ended up regarding as a glorious failure but a grand learning experience, possibly more important to him than his Master of Fine Arts degree which he completed in record time and with distinction (summa cum laude) at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

Ignoring his professors who advised him not to dabble in the genres but to focus on either poetry or short fiction lest he fall through the cracks into obscurity, Hargitai did just the opposite by setting out to master yet another genre, this time the challenging novel form. The most profitable way to learn how to write a novel, he reasoned, was to translate one, perhaps a bildungsroman; thus, 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.

Not long after his return from his sojourn in New England and Europe, Hargitai obtained a teaching position at Florida International University in Miami where he was to work until his retirement in 2012. Although his rigorous academic duties and his literary career vied for attention, he managed to publish during this time 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, and three novels, Attila, Millie, and Daughter of the Revolution; a massive two volume textbook about the Hungarian exilic experience followed in Approaching My Literature, after which he tried his hand at an experimental visionary work, 2012: The Little Horn of Prophecy. But it was in 1994 that Peter Hargitai predicted the exact way in which New York’s Twin Towers came to be destroyed: “And sparks will rain crystal, shooting off brilliant colors in helically twisted beams until the last pillar of the Twin Towers atomized into flakes and snowed onto the firmament.” The foregoing visionary text can be found on page 262 of his Attila: A Barbarian’s Bedtime Story(New York: Püski-Corvin Books, 1994) indexed as Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 93-84984.

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 award-winning translation of Attila József, in the meantime, was not only enjoying a fifth edition and presented at both Miami and Frankfurt Book Fairs, but it 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. Among the contributors was artist, poet and publisher, Henry Logan who was editor of the influential South Florida magazine, Palmetto Review. Peter Hargitai was appointed the first Poet Laureate of Gulfport, Florida in 2015.

Awards

Poetry

Fiction

Translations

Non-fiction