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.