Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Mother Tongue: A Broken Hungarian Love Song
    Mother Tongue: A Broken Hungarian Love Song
    Mother Tongue: A Broken Hungarian Love Song
    Ebook90 pages36 minutes

    Mother Tongue: A Broken Hungarian Love Song

    By Peter Hargitai

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    American Academy of Poets award-winning poet-translator Peter Hargitai considers the raging, aging child in this highly original collection of poems. His earlier work was listed in Yale critic Harold Bloom's prestigious The Western Canon.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisheriUniverse
    Release dateMar 18, 2003
    ISBN9781469782065
    Mother Tongue: A Broken Hungarian Love Song
    Author

    Peter Hargitai

    Dianne Marlene Kress and Peter Hargitai teamed up 48 years ago as high schoold sweethearts in Ohio. She taugh the Hungarian refugee how to speak English so well that he eventually landed a job at the university level teaching English. Retiring after forty years as an academic who even taught Hungarian literature in translation (his own), he plans to spend more time teaming up with his wife as writers in Gulfport, Florida. www.approaching-my-literature.com

    Read more from Peter Hargitai

    Related to Mother Tongue

    Related ebooks

    Poetry For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Three Poems

      Sep 1, 2018

      At twenty past the hour,there is a scent of bacon and wind.Drying flowers on the cigarette machinecrackle in unseen flames. The spirit steps out of the quietfor air and returns to the waterfallof silverware and cups and talk.We don’t have honey wheat

      1 min read

    • Article

      Five Poems

      Nov 1, 2020

      The American linden sways nonplussed by the storm,a bounce here, a shimmy there, just shaking like musicleft over from the night’s end wafting into the avenues before sleep.I remember once walking down Clinton Street, and singingthat line returning,

      4 min read

    • Article

      Poetry Rx: This Is the Year

      Jan 3, 2019

      Poetry Rx: This Is the Year
      7 min read

    • Article

      Poetry

      Jul 6, 2021

      Poetry
      2 min read

    • Article

      Flood The World With Beauty

      Nov 1, 2019

      A big literary conference is probably not the best place for a poet dealing with a mental breakdown. But there I was at AWP, skittishly perusing tables at the book fair, under the garish lights of the Minneapolis Convention Center. For two years, par

      8 min read

    • Article

      An Interview With Xueyan

      Jun 24, 2023

      An Interview With Xueyan
      5 min read

    • Article

      Three Poems by Rohan Chhetri

      Sep 8, 2020

      All summer the half voice lurked behind me & I played deaf for days for to live To not write about it to use my body Part the river’s flesh to operate Machinery is human too to love & for once stay awake through it all. Now it comes like the deer sle

      3 min read

    • Article

      Excerpts From The Works Of The 2024 Whiting Award Winners

      Apr 10, 2024

      The 2024 Whiting Award winners were announced Wednesday night. Below are excerpts from their work.

      19 min read

    • Article

      Poem Of The Week: The North Wind By Anne Brontë

      May 8, 2023

      That wind is from the North, I know it well;No other breeze could have so wild a swell.Now deep and loud it thunders round my cell,Then faintly dies,And softly sighs,And moans and murmurs mournfully.I know its language; thus is speaks to me – ‘I have

      3 min read

    • Article

      Must-Read Poetry: September 2017

      Sep 11, 2017

      Isn’t that one of the purest goals of poetry—to justify our breaths? To recognize that we matter? The post Must-Read Poetry: September 2017 appeared first on The Millions.

      8 min read

    • Article

      Five Poems

      Nov 1, 2020

      We went to visit our brother.They had a special, blue roomfor the purpose of waiting.A counselor came over andcalled my sweater “too provocative.”Nora started laughingand then I started laughingand then our brother came outand told us about the squir

      4 min read

    • Article

      Three Poems

      Jan 1, 2020

      In class, I stared because of the blood going blue.The chalk that coated our fingerly teeth.The way we lapped each other (on the shorewhere the flowering). I gave away our location. Smacked my lips in the coat closet.Sucked at her teeth. We, on all e

      4 min read

    • Article

      Two Poems by Phillip B. Williams

      Dec 15, 2017

      The masters are yet dead. Wanting to be human,I tried to rewrite The Waste Land. The canon’s reachcasts ruinous light. The masters’ pens breachthis page where, above, my own hand spectates. Babylonrisen, exorcism in reverse, whose nature upended now?

      6 min read

    • Article

      Lucky Were the Bodies

      May 3, 2022

      Lucky Were the Bodies
      8 min read

    • Article

      Spell

      Apr 25, 2018

      Spell
      4 min read

    • Article

      Five Poems

      Nov 1, 2022

      Five Poems
      3 min read

    • Article

      Two Poems by Forough Farrokhzad

      Jun 9, 2020

      O my seventh year, the year I turned sevenO wondrous moment of departureAfter you everything that happened happened in a mass of craziness andinsanity After you the window that had been such a vivid and bright connectionbetween the bird and usbetween

      3 min read

    • Article

      From Cantares Mexicanos

      Dec 1, 2023

      Last night I dreamt that I was employed as a suicide prevention specialist in ancient Mesoamerica. We had no phones then so no hotline to call or anything like that. I held these gatherings going place to place for people to tell me their stories and

      3 min read

    • Article

      Four Poems

      Nov 1, 2019

      Four Poems
      7 min read

    • Article

      In The Spotlight:your Writing Dark Side

      Dec 7, 2023

      Spooky season evidently offered creative inspiration aplenty for the WM writers, who responded to the call for writing in November’s crime-themed issue on the theme of ‘Dark Side’ with our fullest mailbox yet. The poetry and prose sent in demonstrate

      4 min read

    • Article

      Must-Read Poetry: December 2017

      Nov 27, 2017

      Poetry won’t make us whole again, but we need a form for our shouts and our cries. The post Must-Read Poetry: December 2017 appeared first on The Millions.

      6 min read

    • Article

      Four Poems

      Nov 1, 2019

      for Rouge they do not knowthe joy they walk with their footprints a lessonof faith O faithful companion of lonelinessthe name we gave you was not a name but a cryand you stayedand now they come to hunt in the wildnot for meat not with the ritual for

      4 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Mother Tongue

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      Mother Tongue - Peter Hargitai

      The First Litter of the Stalinist Era

      I was born in Burok, not a city so much as a word

      That in Hungarian means ‘sack’—a membrane

      That even then protected us from each other, though

      I found out a few years later that it couldn’t save

      The litter, four kittens with their eyes glued shut, Tied into a flour sack and hurled against the wall By my father, an unemployed judge, who had Sentenced them to death by blunt trauma.

      And they died many deaths sprinkled with the flour

      Of our daily bread, and they died not knowing they Lived in Burok, not a real city but a dark world that Hurled them into the People’s Republic of Hungary.

      Seeds

      I’m sorry God didn’t give

      You a daughter—or a son

      More like your brother.

      My blood is much thinner.

      I have not enough reverence For the texture of brown earth, Not the right kind of love

      For its deep darkness. My hands Give me away without calluses. Only thoughts in my head:

      One is a pied brooder, black and white.

      It shivers a moment and gives off a smell. I look down the throat of the furnace,

      A few charred pieces of paper or feathers, Something dry floats out of its mouth.

      It is August. I want to play soccer, I want to run.

      Your house smells of poppy seeds and lentils.

      I saw a tail of a mouse squirm right in. I think There are more of them. I am not happy diving Into a heap of seeds headlong like into water Like you thought I would.

      What if there’s something hidden? What if I dive in, lose my breath,

      And never come back? If I should sink Into that awful sea of seeds piled high To the ceiling, you would never know

      How I gave my life. The roof is a sieve.

      I breathe seeds. More of them than

      Even air. Seeds upon seeds

      Upon seeds pour from the apron of the sky.

      A Brother to Emulate

      Your first born was perfect. A beautiful

      Child who never winced, never made faces,

      Never squinted stupidly, who played the harmonica, Yes, he could carry a melody. At two he’d sing

      He was Miklós Horthy’s brave little soldier, Spur his white steed, fly past seven seas

      And never get older. And six months later

      He knew how to die, how to drink lye

      So he could die beautifully over and over.

      Balástya Station, 1953

      Mother and brother

      Squeeze together

      In a black locomotive.

      They wave, the train pulls out. I huff alongside the tracks, Give it all I have, all throat,

      All lung, all burning to live.

      Let their tiny window

      Fog up with their breathing. Let the wind blow

      Against my flushed skin, Let my longing hug

      My vast expanse

      Of empty air.

      What have I to fear?

      I own the big

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1