Poetry. Translated from the Hungarian by Michael Blumenthal. Kantor shares with his fellow Central and Eastern European poets the destiny of being, unavoidably, a "political" poet of sorts. "The past," as he admits in his long, historically-infused poem, "Ancestors," "hangs from me." And yet his politics...pervasively an "antipolitics," a politics that stands back and observes--with a cold, knowing, and bemused eye--the vagaries and quotidian comi-tragedies of private life as it attempts to cope with and navigate the conundrums of public events and ideologies.

Author City: Budapest HUN

Peter Kantor, one of Hungary's leading poets, was born in Budapest on November 5, l949. Former poetry editor of the most prestigious Hungarian Weekly, Elet Es Irodalom (Life and Literature), he is the author of thirteen books of poems, including Learning to Live, his selected poems published in 2009. Among his numerous awards in Hungary are the highly prestigious Laurel Wreath (2007), Palladium (2009), the Vas Istvan Prize (2005), the Jozsef Attila Prize (1994), the Fust Milan Award (1993), the Dery Prize (1991), as well as two Soros Fellowships and a Fulbright Fellowship to New York in l991-1992. He has read his work at poetry festivals throughout the world, including Struga, Prague, Rotterdam, Toronto, Malmo, London, Bremen, Durban, and Jerusalem. He himself is also a frequent translator of English-language poets, including Delmore Schwartz, Frank O'Hara, Robert Bly, Peter Porter, Douglas Dunn, and Paul Muldoon, as well as of classical and early twentieth century Russian poets and prose writers, including Pushkin, Mandelstam, Akhmatova, Bulgakov, Remizov, and Pilnyak.