For a number of years, the Malta Classics Association has contributed to the annual Evenings on Campus festival amusing short plays on topics related to Roman and Greek literature or philosophy.

This year’s offering, Il-Properzju tal-Professur by Karmenu Serracino, has as its protagonist the actual head of the University of Malta’s Department of Classics, Horatio Vella, who plays himself – slightly tetchy, insisting on academic preciseness and greatly devoted to the literatures he teaches.

Most of this short piece is occupied by a lightly comical interview given by Vella to a two-man team from a television channel, about Vella’s new translation into Maltese of the poems, known as Elegies. These were written by the great Roman poet Propertius in the first century BC when Octavius, later called Augustus, ruled Rome.

Vella proves to be a difficult interviewee, bringing his interviewer (Keith Borg) close to losing his patience and to clashing with his camera person (Lara Borg Vella), a former student of Vella who objects to her colleague’s somewhat uncivil behaviour to her old professor.

Vella speaks of Propertius, about whose life little is known, and says much more about the poems themselves. Most of these were inspired by the passionate love of the poet for an attractive woman he calls Cynthia, who caused him joy at times but also grief at others.

I found that Vella has actually produced a Maltese prose version of the Elegies

Vella has interesting information about the kind of verse used by Propertius in all his elegies and makes the audience hear how it must have sounded when recited, which was rather bizarre, actually.

He nearly brings the house down when he chants an entire elegy. This gets seriously on the nerves of the interviewer, who insists that this should be omitted from the recording.

On this matter and on another disagreement he has voiced about the way Vella was answering questions, he finds very serious opposition from the camera person. The old professor has found a very loyal former student in her.

Vella gives us the flavour of his translations from the Latin verse by reading out verses in the original and his Maltese prose version of them. To me they sounded as if they could greatly clarify the meaning of the original Latin which, while in Vella’s view it may not be particularly difficult, is far from easy for those who, like me, studied Latin literature well over half a century ago.

The interview ends rather surprisingly with an exhortation to Vella’s audience to revive the old widespread interest in classical studies and he also makes a few scathing remarks about contemporary students’ lack of academic solidity. He delivers this with the strength of conviction, but I wonder how seriously many young students will consider it.

To my surprise, I found at the end of the piece that Vella has actually produced a Maltese prose version of Propertius’s Elegies and I was able to buy a copy of these translations in a neatly printed and produced (and low-priced) volume published in Assisi by the Prestigious Accademia Properziana del Subiaco.

My congratulations to the Malta Classical Association for combining their annual theatre production with a book launch for a work by one of their most distinguished members.

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