The collection which Hargitai edited with Lolette Kuby was introduced by Paul Engle and featured, among others, Robert Wallace, Alberta Turner, Hale Chatfield, Russell Atkins, and Grace Butcher, alongside student poets.

In 1978, Hargitai secured a position at the University of Miami[1] teaching Composition and introductory courses in English and American literatures; the early 80's saw him turning his attention once again to Attila József, and he continued publishing individual poems although a collection did not come together until Perched on Nothing's Branch, released by Apalachee Press in 1987.

The experience with the Nobel Laureate proved to be profound and genre changing; under Singer's tutelage, he became not only an enthusiastic student of short fiction but the Nobel Laureate's personal chauffeur from the Coral Gables campus to his Surfside condominium: Hargitai found himself drawn to the short story, and he started publishing his stories in respectable journals on both sides of the Atlantic.

[citation needed] In 1988 under a grant from the Fulbright-Hayes Foundation he was able to spend time in Hungary and Italy translating Antal Szerb’s 1937 novel The Traveler and the Moonlight.

[citation needed] His translation of Attila József was listed by Yale critic Harold Bloom in his The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages.