Poesie o poems o poeziji

Tell us about the second book launch that you mentioned in the interview last week?

Professor J.J. Cremona is very well known as former Chief Justice of Malta, Vice-President of the European Court of Human Rights and the main drafter of the Maltese Constitution.

But I myself have, for more than half a century, nourished a greater admiration and affection for John Cremona, the literary innovator who in Malta wrote the first 'modern' poem in Italian, way back in the 1930s, and who is still producing equally fresh poetry, now in Maltese, when he is over 90.

The present collection actually creates overall an unintended post-modernist effect. In fact, its first section contains 27 poems written in Italian between 1938-40, that is after the publication of his first published collection, Eliotropi .

The second section contains 24 poems written in English, after the publication of his second collection of poems in that language, Malta Malta. (The first was called Songbook of the South).

The third section contains poems in Maltese written since the publication of his second collection in that language, Ekwinozju. Several of these short lyrics written in the last score of years refer to the events and environment of the 1930s.

Thus topics that appear in the author's enthusiastic perception of the new world and age that was being glimpsed over the horizon re-appear as now differently perceived through the mature eyes and ripe sensitivity of the nonagenarian sage.

A quasi-post-modernist impression may follow from the juxtaposition of different visions of the same objects as seen from shifting points of view. The senior citizen's recollections of his youth can be compared to the actual expression of the youthful world-view.

His reminiscences show him to have discarded the ardent idealism with which he wrote in his twenties, but he never falls into the fashionable cynicism or ethical relativism. He does not look back with romantic nostalgia either, but rather with irony and a happy dose of self-mockery.

What are the motivations and the differences between the poems written in the three different languages?

There is a remarkable continuity in the technique used in all the three languages of which the poet has complete mastery. The extremely personal style of versification was obviously evolved in function of the Italian language with its vocalic and adjectival richness.

Surprisingly, he manages to recreate an analogous tonal effect in English despite the very different properties of the language, through the use of such devices as enjambment, assonance and internal rhymes.

In fact, these devices correspond to a world vision, in which everything is connected to everything else, one thing runs on into the next, and a complex network of likenesses and associations permeates the universe.

The last Italian poem to be written, Scritta in Guerra, serves as a bridge to the war poems produced from 1940 onwards. Some of them incidentally, have been magnificently set to music by Charles Camilleri. The Italian poem asks whether with death all around, it was worthwhile to water roses.

The answer is implicitly clear in the very fact that the poet continues to write even though he obviously felt obliged to carry out the very difficult task of changing the language that he was using as his medium.

I have previously pointed out that Thomas Pynchon, perhaps the greatest contemporary American novelist, makes use of a main motif in Cremona's war poetry to indicate a shift in Maltese culture brought about by the war.

The motif is that of evolution in reverse, a regression from a civilised mode of living (and of linguistic expression) to a crude primitivism that even sinks to infra-brutality. Pynchon makes his Maltese protagonist, Fausto Majjistral, change the style in which he writes poetry from one that is patently based on Prof. Aquilina's conservative verse to a style that embodies the return to pre-history that Cremona thematised.

The change to Maltese occurred only after the advent of the new millennium, although what provoked it was rather the death of his beloved wife, Beatrice. He dreamt up a poem in Maltese about her now more subtle but even stronger presence than ever before.

In fact, the rendering of that which is permanent and lasts forever in the midst of the ever-accelerating pace of change is the really major theme that is the golden thread in the whole range of the poet's output.

Why do you think that this book is relevant, if at all, to Malta's political identity?

The poet is really interested in what Braudel calls the 'structures', the enduring framework that does not change for long periods of time, not in what Braudel calls 'conjunctures', features that only change slowly over decades, and events, which are the contingent happenings that most pre-Braudelian historians generally concentrated upon.

Mythological themes are omnipresent. Myths are stories that did not happen in the past, but are present at all times. For instance, Calypso who naturally has a special fascination for a Gozitan is depicted as an eternal figure - that is as she is portrayed by all the great writers from Homer to Joyce, woman as archetypal spiritual temptress, the counterpart to Circe, who is the materialist enchantress.

These poems frequently evoke both the Mediterranean landscape generally and the Maltese more particularly. The seascape is even more symbolically present but, physical space is always pictured as bearing the traces not only of natural forces but also of history.

For this reason the physical environment so precisely and sensitively evoked is a major clue to national identity. But Cremona, who lovingly drafted the Constitution of Independent Malta, does not seem to care overmuch as a poet for the more trivial and rapidly transient aspects of political activity.

Fr Peter Serracino Inglott was talking to Miriam Vincenti.