Orsolya Láng: Ház, délután [A House in the Afternoon]. Budapest –Prae Kiadó – Lector Publishers, 2024.

Category: poetry
Pages: 92
Cover: paperback
ISBN: 978-615-6675-16-3; 978-606-8957-50-0;

 Orsolya Láng (born 1987, Satu Mare, Romania) is a writer, poet, visual artist, and film director. She was born in 1987, grew up in Transylvania. In 2017 she received her master’s degree in Animation from the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design in Budapest. Currently, she is a doctoral student there. She won the Grand Prix at KAFF in 2019 with her graduation film Off Season. In 2022, she received the Junior Szépíró Literary Award. She won the László Bertók Literary Award for young authors in 2023. She is the author of five books: Tejszobor [Milk Sculpture] (prose, 2015), Bordaköz [Intercostal] (poems, 2016), Pályamatricák [Freeway Stickers] (travelogues, 2020), Személyes okok [Personal Reasons] (poems, 2021), Ház, délután [A House in the Afternoon] (poems, 2024). She also illustrates books.

 Reading Orsolya Láng’s latest book feels like entering a space of calm, a time of slow, afternoon moments. These works create a space and a poetic language for observations, appearing denser, more compact, and more elaborate than the poems in Personal Reasons (2021). Her ability to see the essence in sights and phenomena and show it, has so far been most evident in the author’s prose and drawings, but the poems in A House in the Afternoon are able to convey the same vision with sensitivity and sophistication. The volume’s material is not arranged in cycles, and there is no need for this, because we encounter a very unified, elaborated, but not at all monolithic poetic world, without the imposition of additional compositional meaning. The works are in subtle dialogue with each other.

Octavian Soviany: Magellán sarka. [Magellan’s Heel] Translation: Zoltán Király. Târgu Mureș, Lector Publishers, 2024.

Category: poetry
Pages: 174
Cover: hardback
ISBN 978-606-8957-49-4

Octavian Soviany, poet, prose writer, literary translator, literary critic, was born in Brasov in 1954. After graduating from the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Cluj-Napoca, he worked as a journalist and editor and taught Romanian and world literature. He has published numerous books of poetry, prose and drama, and his poems have been translated into English, French, German, Polish and Hungarian.

The poems in Magellan’s Heel are pseudo-travelogues richly peppered with cultural references, as well as detours into the dusty archives of history, nostalgic walks through the past of art and literature. Here the author constructs a highly personalised map of a Europe haunted by a secret ambition to self-destruct; he puts on paper the horrors of a death-worshipper obsessed with the destructive forces of history. The book won the Poetry Book of the Year Award in Bucharest in 2014.

Desertum (2nd edition) Târgu Mureș, Lector Publishers, 2023.

Category: novel
Pages: 208
Cover: paperback
ISBN: 978-606-8957-47-0

Ferenc Vincze (born 1979, Târgu Mureș, Romania) is a writer, translator, and literary historian. He is editor of the literary periodical Szépirodalmi Figyelő. He received the Géza Csáth Literary Award in 2023, presented by the FISZ (Hungarian: Fiatal Írók Szövetsége, Association of Young Writers). He authored the following books: A macska szeme. Prózai írások. [Cat Eye] Napkút–FISZ, 2007; Desertum. (1. kiadás) Regény. Orpheusz, 2014; A hegyi hódok tündöklése és bukása. Novellák, elbeszélések. [The Rise and Fall of the Mountain Beavers] Lector, 2020; Az utolsó történet. Elbeszélések. [The Last Story] Lector, 2022.

Desertum explores the dynamics of remembering and forgetting, for these two processes occur simultaneously: we remember, but we also forget and are aware of the omissions. In fact, there’s a suggestion that what is truly important is what remains unspoken. Ferenc Vincze’s novel is narrated by grandfathers of various nationalities (more than two). Each, in their own way, has experienced the same thing. After all, birth, love, death, success, and failure – like a desert (perhaps a desolate emptiness, or perhaps a barren expanse?), or perhaps a final, celebratory dessert – are the fundamental experiences that define our humanity. And here, in (almost) the present: Eastern Europe, in a multicultural region reminiscent of Transylvania, in a time that has yet to grapple with the weight of the grandfathers’ era. The book attempts precisely that, reopening the partially healed wounds time and again.

Tamás Dénes: A tó. [The Lake] Târgu Mureș, Lector Publishers, 2023.

Category: fiction
Pages: 148
Cover: paperback
ISBN 978-606-8957-48-7

Born in 1975 in the village of Réty near Sfântu Gheorghe, Romania. He is currently a professor at the Communication Department of Sapientia University in Miercurea Ciuc. His essays, prose and reviews are regularly published in the Hungarian literary press. he authored the following volumes: Honfoglaló esszék, 2013; Minden Egész, 2016; Az élő ház, 2019; Rémegyszerű versek, 2020; Könyvjelzők, 2020.

The main character of Dénes Tamás’ book is a mountain lake. Protagonists are only found in novels and films, but the wandering narrator does not want to tell a story, but to put his experience of the landscape into words. He wants to do with words what landscape painters do with their brushes. He approaches the lake, the mountain, the rocks, the trees and the bushes, the clouds and the air with words, like Cézanne. Dénes Tamás attempted the impossible when he tried to recreate the sensory complexity of the landscape experience and the accompanying cerebral sparks in a written work. The experiment succeeded: a great ‘painting’ appears before the reader, the landscape – in other words, the four elements – becomes a powerful actor.

Ilarie Voronca: Ulysses. Translation by Imre József Balázs. Illustrated by Rebeka Hatházi. Târgu Mureș, Lector Publishers, 2023.

Category: poetry
Pages: 84
Cover: hardback
ISBN 978-606-8957-45-6

The figure of Ulysses represents the key human experience of the eternal traveller who longs for home. The Romanian surrealist poet Ilarie Voronca’s (1903-1946) Ulysses shows the modern man in a constant state of wandering, searching and travelling as part of the zeitgeist. The poem summarises the poet’s life experiences, depicting urban and rural landscapes, personal and communal experiences, all linked by the poet’s trademark dense surrealist verse language. Voronca’s poem focuses on the commonplace, on the evocative wonders of the banal, and paints a mosaic-like picture of an era he calls ‘the century of mediocrity’.

Pulzus. [Pulse.] Illustrations by Annabella Orosz. Prae Publishers – Lector Publishers, Budapest – Târgu Mureș, 2023.

Category: poetry
Pages: 140
Cover: paperback
ISBN: 978-606-8957-44-9

Noémi László (born 1973, Cluj, Romania) is a poet, translator, and editor of two children’s literary magazines, Napsugár and Szivárvány. In 2010, she received the József Attila Literary Award. She authored the following books of poetry: Nonó, 1995; Az ébredés előterében, 1996; Esés után, 2000; Százegy, 2004; Papírhajó, 2009; Labdarózsa, 2010; Feketeleves, 2010; Afrika, 2011; Föld, 2013; Bodzabél, 2017; Műrepülés, 2020; Darázsolás, 2022; and a collection of tales, Keljfeljancsi, 2023.

Every volume of poetry is an invitation to travel, but some invite us on many different journeys. Noémi László’s Pulse is a collection of poems that are each connected to a particular city, region, or street. Whether set in Transylvania, Hungary, or around the world, they all reveal and make personal the spaces they inhabit for the reader. The poems, however, also travel widely in time, evoking ancient mthologies and making them present-day, while effortlessly and naturally engaging with constant change. Pulse is undoubtedly a reckoning with the poet’s life’s work to date, and thus first and foremost asks how she once related to existence and how she relates to it now.

Alina Nelega: As if Nothing Happened [Mintha mi sem történt volna]. Translated by Orsolya András. Targu Mureș, Lector Publishers, 2023.

Category: fiction
Pages: 452
Cover: paperback
ISBN: 978-606-8957-44-9

“At first glance, a story like thousands of others, about growing up during the 1980s in Romania, but the author is a playwright and theatre director, and it shows in the phenomenally fluid way she slips into other people’s voice and stories. The main character here is Cristina, who has to come to terms with her own sexuality as a lesbian, which was completely illegal in Ceauşescu’s Romania and punishable with jail, but there are many other experiences we hear too, in an indirect but extremely lively speech, as if we are following someone filming a speeded up documentary of tragicomic scenes. (…) One unforgettable vignette is when Cristina, who lives in a small town in the north of the country, attempts to go to the seaside with her small son and her friend Nana. As they reach Bucharest on the train, she realises she forgot to take the rubbish out and that her house might be full of cockroaches when she gets back from holidays. She can’t phone her friends to take out the rubbish, because most of them don’t have a phone or else aren’t close enough to borrow a set of keys off someone and empty her bin. She can’t go back to do it herself, as the train connections are horrible and it would take her forever. So she decides it would be best to send a telegram from the Central Post and Telephone Office in Bucharest (the only place from which you could send telegrams at the time), but the girl at the counter becomes suspicious that Cristina’s laconic text ‘Please throw rubbish’ could be a code for something political, so she refuses to send it. (Findingtimetowrite blog)

Tibor Dáné: A Tatár-hágó előtere. [The Battlefields of Galicia] Târgu Mureș, Lector Publishers, 2023.

Category: memoir
Pages: 480
Cover: hardback
ISBN 978-606-8957-43-2

Tibor Dáné (1923-2006), writer and editor from Cluj-Napoca, Romania. He wrote non-fiction as well as YA literature. Some of the books he authored: Athá-Rá, a fáraó írnoka (1958), A Tau Ceti hívójele (1968), Négy tenger hajósa (1973), A varázsvessző lovagja (1978), A fáraó igazlátó szeme (1979).

This book is the author’s recollections of his experiences as a Hungarian army officer in the Second World War. The work, which is in the tradition of both military memoirs and literary coming-of-age stories, focuses on the year and a half that the author spent on the Galician front and as a prisoner of war from 24 March 1944 (his twenty-first birthday) to the end of June 1945. The book, however, only loosely follows the chronological order of events, occasionally veering towards the antecedents or the subsequent development of the fate of the individual characters, according to the mechanism of memory, thus providing a readable chronography of twentieth-century Hungary and Transylvania, and above all of Cluj-Napoca. Among the many WWII war diaries and memoirs that have now been published, the author’s skill as a writer stands out for the way he portrays the sometimes tragic, sometimes humorous experiences. The eerie topicality of the book is given by the fact that, not far from the place of the title, war is ravaging again…

Éva Blénesi (ed.): Kortárs örmény versek/ Jamanaka’kits hai po’ezia. [Contemporary Armenian Poetry] Târgu Mureș, Association of Hungarian Armenians in Transylvania – Lector Publishers, 2022.

Categories: anthology
Pages: 200
Cover: hardback
ISBN 978-606-8957-40-1

The authors of this bilingual anthology of poetry are the following: Husik Ara, Vahe Arsen, Anush Aslibekyan, Nerses Atabekyan, Shushan Avagyan, Peter Balakian, Krikor Beledian, Tatev Chakhian, Diramerján Artin, Keith Garebian, Eduard Harents, Anahit Hayrapetyan, Lola Koundakjian, Vahram Martirosyan, Noushik Mikayelian, Anna Muradyan, Nora Nadjarian, Hermine Navasardyan, Marine Petrossian, Armen Shekoyan. The Hungarian translators are: Fenyvesi Orsolya, Gerevich András, Kaáli Nagy Botond, Kali Kinga, László Noémi, Szabó T. Anna és Tábor et.

Florin Irimia: A kínai kisautók rejtélye [The mystery of the Chinese toy cars]. Hungarian translation by Szabolcs Szonda. Tîrgu Mureș, 2022.

Category: Fiction
Pages: 288
Cover: paperback
ISBN 978-606-8957-42-5

About the author and the translator:

Florin Irimia (1976, Iași) writer, translator, Assistant Professor at the Alexandru Ioan Cuza University, Iași. Books: Defekt (a roman awarded at the 2013 Festival of First Bookers in Chambéry); O fereastră întunecată (roman, 2012); Câteva lucruri despre tine (roman, 2014), Misterul mașinuțelor chinezești (roman, 2017), Bărbatul din spatele ceții (roman, 2021). Szabolcs Szonda (1974, Sfântu Gheorghe) translator, Director of the Covasna County Library. He authored two books: Kiegyezés a tükörrel (poems, 1998); Vagyontárgyalás (poems, 2002). Some of his translations: Simona Popescu: Xilofon (1998); Ardian-Christian Kuciuk: A hattyú feltalálásának éve (2005); Simona Popescu: Vedlések (2008); Dan Lungu: Tyúkok a mennyben (2016); Alexandru Mușina: Macska-e a cica? (2020.)

About the book:

Florin Irimia’s book is a unique coming-of-age novel: a journey through familiar yet surprising spiritual landscapes, with a thrillingly personal approach. A bundle of forty stories, which can be read as stand-alone, in which the chapter titles are often key concepts in the search for self and selfhood: the places and prominent figures of childhood homes and imagination, family members and relationships, lives and food, emotions and senses, objects and moods. The storytelling follows the ups and downs of lifelong adulthood, at a time when it was an event for a Romanian child to pick up a Rubik’s cube, for example. The way the mosaic pieces of memory recall are put together is somewhat similar to the way a cube is put together.