Perched on Nothing's Branch & Selected Poems

by Attila József, Peter Hargitai (Translator)

Overview

Attila József (1905-1937), a towering, tragic poet in modern 20th Century world literature, was an orphan and a social outcast whose innovative raw imagery captured the plight of suffering humanity during his chaotic age. American poet Peter Hargitai's translation, bold, brilliant, and refreshingly contemporary in diction and format, celebrates 120 years of Attila József. His volume Perched on Nothing's Branch is listed in Harold

Bloom's The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9798341892408
Publisher:	Barnes & Noble Press
Publication date:	02/11/2025
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.51(d)

About the Author

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Attila József (1905-1937) was one of the greatest Hungarian poets of the 20th century. Although his first
poems were published when he was 17, real renown came only after his death. József was attracted by
Marxist ideology and became a member of the then-illegal Communist Party. In 1932 he launched a short-
lived literary periodical, Valóság, and in 1936 became one of the cofounders of the review Szép Szó. In his
own poetry József presented intimate pictures of proletarian life. He immortalized his mother, a poor
washerwoman, and made her a symbol of the working class. He created a style of melancholy realism,
infused with irrationality, through which he was able to express the complex feelings of modern men
and reveal his own faith in life’s essential beauty and harmony.

ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
Peter Hargitai is a poet in his own right. His poem “Mother’s Visit No. 29” was published in the anthology
Sixty Years of American Poetry with an introduction by Robert Penn Warren and a preface by Richard
Wilber (Abrams, 1996). He is also an award-winning literary translator. His selection of the poems of Attila
József in Perched on Nothing’s Branch garnered for him the Academy of American Poets Landon
Translation Prize (1988) and a listing among world classics in Harold Bloom’s The Western Canon: The Books
and School of the Ages. Hargitai’s versions are not just translations. They are re-creations. As a poet he is
able to inject himself into the heart of the originals, and by conveying the spirit of each poem, he is able to
avoid banal mirror translations, jingly rhymes and archaic cadences, allowing the originals to thrive in
contemporary English as the great poems that they are in their original Magyar.

Editorial Reviews

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 will be welcomed by József's admirer's and will certainly add to their number.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/237509.Perched_on_Nothing_s_Branch - Donaldson Justice

These poems are ageless, mirroring the human condition and focusing on humankind's existential loneliness.

https://www.wikiwand.com/hu/articles/Perched_on_Nothing%E2%80%99s_Branch - Maxine Kumin

These grim, bitter, iron-clad poems emerge technically strong, spare and authentic in English,
and they are admirably contemporary in syntax.

in Citation for the Academy of American Poets https://www.bookloft.com/book/9781609270124 - May Swenson

A poignant collection of poetry that delves into the depths of human experience, reflecting on
themes of poverty, alienation, and the search for meaning.
—The Greatest Books

https://thegreatestbooks.org/books/9627