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Henry Frendo, Dimech’s Lost Prison Poems, Midsea Books, 2014, pp. 128.
On July 25, 1883, aged only 22, from his sombre prison cell in Corradino, Emmanuele Dimech joined a centuries-old chain of lyricists, since Aesop, in singing the virtues of the humblest of creatures, the ant.
He entitled his simple poem in Italian Alla Formica, echoing Jean de La Fontaine’s enlightened verse about La cigale et la fourmi (The Grasshopper and the Ant).
After La Fontaine (1621-1695) who had queried the ant’s summer activities a good two hundred years before (Que faisiez-vous au temps chaud?), Dimech quizzed his insect’s diligent enterprise in scorching heat.
But La Fontaine’s inspirations did not stop with the ant. In the same year, the industrious bee and the docile, abused donkey also attracted Dimech’s inspired muse. In all probability, he was finding solace in coming to terms with his own shattered fortunes.
Like the ant, this young man had no other option but to bide his time and invest in a future, possibly better, destiny.
Analysing Dimech’s poetics of hope and despondency in his introductory essay, Henry Frendo tells us that Manuel Dimech (1860-1921) received his erudite education from Catholic Maltese prison chaplains.
We are to assume that these well-read clerics must have been conscious of the difficult times the island’s lower classes were living in, with poverty and ignorance as their daily loaves and fish.
Dimech was a product of the destitute and the crestfallen. Yet, after roaming the streets of Valletta throughout his ragamuffin childhood and adolescent years, he could not possibly have missed to grasp the chasm that separated his penniless lot from the glistening uniforms of well-fed lads marching on parade grounds on his native terrain.
Dimech’s Lost Prison Poems is not just an anthology of his early verses. Rather, it provides us with an evidential materialisation of the formation and construction of a young Maltese intellect from point zero to a classical, albeit ideal, romantic perspicacity.
He was maturing into a humble, yet defiant, wise but wily, politician. Surrounded, as he must have been, by an emerging class of Maltese loyal subjects to the foreigner, he must have been imbued by the essence of resistance through an Italianate culture.
The pages between the attractive cover of this Midsea elite piece of Melitensia encompass three sections, the first being the compiler’s analysis and guide to the discovered documents.
The second section reproduces tale quale the original tidy scripts of the author, while the third section carries transcriptions of 23 poems in Italian with one, entitled La Vie, in French.
Several poems are accompanied by Prof. Frendo’s insightful footnotes. A few letters received by Dimech wind up the publication, which also carries a useful Index. Dimech demonstrates almost absolute control on his writing skills.
Apparently well-versed in the Latin languages, his stanzas are all quite legible, hardly ever showing any corrections or postscripts, as most poets tend to do
Apparently well-versed in the Latin languages, his stanzas are all quite legible, hardly ever showing any corrections or postscripts, as most poets tend to do.
I suspect that these manuscripts comprised the last versions he would have copied from his own first drafts after perhaps having them corrected by his tutors.
That would also explain his linguistic capability, infrequent mistakes and elaborate calligraphy in certain titles.
As Frendo rightly points out, Dimech seems to have put his ‘idle’ time in prison to maximum gain. This he did by reading whatever was available in the prison library and perhaps more so in his tutors’ collections.
Citing French moralist Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle (1657-1757) to introduce his Pazienza at bearing pugni e graffi (fists and scratches), Dimech goes on to encapsulate La Vie in two words: Très courte joie, longue douleur (very short joy, long pain).
Like Voltaire (1694-1778), the philosophical result of his prison academy was destined to centre on a lifelong fearless battle he waged against injustice, in defence of the weak against the powerful.
These are characteristics that at the end brought him excommunication, exile, death on foreign soil and, hopefully reassessed, national recognition by a community celebrating 50 years of the independence he foretold.