Peter Hargitai

I’m a retired Senior Lecturer in English, a literary translator, poet, and novelist, and a pariah. I had taught at the University of Miami, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and at Florida International University. My unorthodox and unstructured teaching style combined free writing, flow theory, and stand-up comedy. As a bonus, I also taught Hungarian literature in the guise of English Composition. That proved to have profound repercussions, but it was through my efforts, back in the stone age of the 70’s to my retirement in 2012, that American students were introduced to the works of Attila József and Antal Szerb in translation (my own). My rank-obsessed colleagues at FIU were critical of a professor using his own books in class and had to be reminded that the author did not profit from the sale of his books as he contributed all royalties to the FIU Foundation to be used for educational and charitable purposes. When one fundamentalist Director of Composition urged me to eschew my own books in favor of traditional rhetoric where students could write about how to make a perfect peanut butter and jelly sandwich, I respectfully declined. It must have galled him and his cult members, that my translation of Attila József’s poems in Perched on Nothing’s Branch was awarded the Harold Morton Landon Translation Prize by the Academy of American Poets, and that my own poem, “Mother’s Visit No. 29” appeared in Sixty Years of American Poetry, introduced by Robert Penn Warren, with a Preface by Richard Wilbur. When I was listed in Harold Bloom’s The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages, that was the last straw. That’s when things went from bad to testicular. Either they avoided me in the hall or ambushed me at meetings where they called me out for not being a team-player and accused me of being a ‘pain in the ass.’ Not in those words, of course. Instead, they resorted to language like 'eccentric, truculent, and bizarre.' My response was a shrill and sustained mad guffaw. The Chair of the Department shouted, 'This is outrageous!' but I just kept on laughing. I couldn't stop. I was over the moon. That made my day. Come to think of it, that was also my last day.