Award-winning translator Peter Hargitai celebrates 100 years of Attila Jozsef (1905-1937) in this new selection of 100 poems. His previous selection, Perched On Nothing's Branch (1986), enjoyed a remarkable run of five editions and won for him the Academy of American Poets' Landon Translation Award. His translation of Attila Jozsef is listed among the world classics cited by Harold Bloom in The Western Canon. Praise for Peter Hargitai's translation of Attila Jozsef: These grim, bitter, iron-cold poems emerge technically strong, spare and authentic in English, and they are admirably contemporary in syntax. -May Swenson in Citation for the Academy of American Poets A rich nuanced translation by Peter Hargitai. These poems are ageless, mirroring the human conditions and focusing in humankind's existential loneliness. -Maxine Kumin I have long thought of Attila Jozsef 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 by Peter Hargitai will be welcomed by Jozsef's admirers and will certainly add to their number. academic, whereas peter Hargitai's versions are colloquial and emotionally charged as the originals. Reading them one lapses into the silence that attends the reception of all great poetry. -David Kirby.

Attila Jozsef is Hungary's greatest modern poet. His extraordinary poetry is exhilarating in its power, transcending the scars of a difficult life. Born into poverty in 1905, deserted by his father and put out to fostering, Jozsef had a brutalised childhood, and tried to poison himself at the age of nine. Mostly self-educated, he was prosecuted at 18 for blasphemy in a poem, and expelled from university a year later for With a Pure Heart, a now celebrated poem which spoke for a whole generation. He is a genuine revolutionary poet, neither simple-minded nor difficult, though his thought and imagery are complex. A deeply divided man, his poetry has a robust physicality as well as a jaunty and heroic intelligence - Marxist in its dedication but fuelled in its audacity by both Freud and Surrealism. Diagnosed as schizophrenic, he underwent psychoanalysis, and yet continued to write magnificent poetry which - although darker - drew upon highly exacting and intricate structures and metres, and upon an eclectic but balanced framework of ideas. By 1937 he was almost destitute, financially and emotionally, and in deteriorating mental health. But he was still writing some of his most compelling work, compulsive guilt-ridden poetry whose glittering lyricism is at once personal and mythic, even while receiving shock treatments and heavy medication in a sanatorium. Finally, at the age of 32, he clambered onto a railway track, and a train broke his neck and cut off his right arm.

Award-winning translator Peter Hargitai celebrates 100 years of Attila Jozsef (1905-1937) in this new selection of 100 poems. His previous selection, Perched On Nothing's Branch (1986), enjoyed a remarkable run of five editions and won for him the Academy of American Poets' Landon Translation Award. His translation of Attila Jozsef is listed among the world classics cited by Harold Bloom in The Western Canon. Praise for Peter Hargitai's translation of Attila Jozsef: These grim, bitter, iron-cold poems emerge technically strong, spare and authentic in English, and they are admirably contemporary in syntax. - May Swenson in Citation for the Academy of American Poets. A rich nuanced translation by Peter Hargitai. These poems are ageless, mirroring the human conditions and focusing in humankind's existential loneliness. - Maxine Kumin. I have long thought of Attila Jozsef 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 by Peter Hargitai will be welcomed by Jozsef's admirers and will certainly add to their number. - Donald Justice. Hargitai's versions are colloquial and emotionally charged as the originals. Reading them one lapses into the silence that attends the reception of all great poetry. - David Kirby.