Maltese contemporary literature features in international magazine

Contemporary literature gets a well-deserved boost as the latest edition of the international magazine Transcript is dedicated solely to promoting works by Maltese writers.

Translated works of veteran writers such as Mario Azzopardi, Joe Friggieri, Trevor Zahra and Albert Marshall as well as younger elements like Immanuel Mifsud and Norbert Bugeja can be read, in English, on the online literary magazine.

The magazine, in its 38th issue, is published by Literature Across Frontiers and aims to make literature in the smaller languages of Europe available to a wider European public. “This is the first time that a whole issue has been dedicated to Maltese language,” said Marco Galea, a senior lecturer at the University of Malta, who was appointed editor for this Maltese edition.

“Very little work is translated into English and Transcript is an initiative supported by the Culture 2000 programme of the European Union to try to start to redress this imbalance,” said Dr Galea. He explained that works in lesser known languages could be read through the medium of English, French and German.

Having a special issue dedicated to Maltese is deemed very significant: “It’s important, from time to time, to take stock of our literature and present it to a wider public,” said Dr Galea.

This has been done at intervals throughout the decades, starting with Laurent Ropa, who had published a short anthology of Maltese poetry translated into French in 1937. In the 1960s, A.J. Arberry had translated what came to be known as A Maltese Anthology, in the 1970s, Mario Azzopardi edited A Memorable Malta: The New Poetry and in the 1980s, Arnold Cassola edited Il-Maltin Kontemporanji.

According to Dr Galea, it was time to take a new snapshot of contemporary literature and present it to an international public. “Of course, we were lucky in that a forum existed already where we could showcase Maltese literature,” he said referring to Transcript.

Publisher Literature Across Frontiers is an organisation based at Aberystwyth University in Wales. Transcript can be accessed online at www.transcript-review.org/en.

The magazine was official launched in Malta as part of the European Commission’s celebration of the European Day of Languages organised by the Malta Representation.

The EU Commission field officer in Malta, Brian Buhagiar, said that with more than 23 official languages and over 40 regional and minority languages, the Day of Languages “aims to celebrate this diversity and remind all Europeans of the importance of language learning”.

The Maltese language has benefitted vastly from being an official EU language, said Mr Buhagiar. “The more palpable benefits have been the establishment of a University faculty dedicated to translation and interpretation and the birth of a Maltese translation industry,” he said.

There could also be a link between the recent signs of a burgeoning Maltese literary life and the newly-acquired status of the language, Mr Buhagiar noted: “The timing could simply be happenstance but the fact that a fair number of these new wave authors are or were at a certain point, translators in Luxembourg and Brussels, lends more plausibility to the thesis.”

The Maltese writers and poets featuring in the magazine have all been active in recent years. Dr Galea said that each chosen writer had at least one published book. “Of course, we were looking for quality literature and also literature that could be enjoyed by people who are not familiar with Maltese writing.”

So does he believe that there has been a renaissance in Maltese literature over these past few years?

“Renaissance is a big word. It implies that there has been a time, and that time was quite recently, when Maltese literature was not worth reading. However, if you look back over a period of 100 years or so, every decade produced interesting works of literature. I do not think the situation is very different today,” he said.