The author of a book about a Maltese family’s struggle to survive in Cardiff 50 years ago is delighted that her debut novel, a Booker Prize finalist, has finally been translated into Maltese.
“It means more than I can say. I’ve been fortunate enough to have my work translated into 20 languages, but I always hoped that someday The Hiding Place would be available to be read by Maltese people in their mother tongue.
“I was delighted when I found out that it would finally happen,” Trezza Azzopardi said.
Born in Cardiff to a Gozitan father and a Welsh mother, Ms Azzopardi published her first novel in 2000.
It won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize and was shortlisted for both the Booker Prize for Fiction and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. The book was also adapted for BBC Radio 4’s Book at Bedtime and has been translated into at least 18 languages, now including Maltese.
Set in the Maltese community of Tiger Bay in Cardiff, The Hiding Place is narrated by Dolores, the youngest of six daughters born to a Welsh mother and Maltese immigrant Frankie Gauci, who is a gambler – he even sells his daughter Marina to gangster Joe Medora in exchange for a house and money to pay off his debt.
When Steve Borg read the novel and favourable reviews about it in the British media, he knew it had to be translated into Maltese.
“It dispels the romantic notion that all was well with the Maltese who settled in Britain in the post-war period.
The Maltese migrant Frankie Gauci is a chauvinistic low-life who gambles, steals, repeatedly abuses his wife and children and keeps company with other shady Maltese individuals.
“His dysfunctional family shows that while some integrated successfully within British society, others did not and this could also be due to the different cultural upbringing that they had in Malta.
Cover of Il-Moħba, as provided by Klabb Kotba Maltin.“I wanted to make Maltese readers feel discomfort and disdain around these characters, rather than identify with them. They had shamed us.”
It took Mr Borg three years to translate the book into Maltese as Il-Moħba, and there were some parts in slang that heralded extreme caution to avoid a literal translation.
Ms Azzopardi, who has been to Malta several times to visit relatives, including her late sister Paola, was mainly inspired by the 1950s and 1960s, particularly old films and music.
“I drew on the landscape of Cardiff to a large extent too, as at the time of writing The Hiding Place, so much of the city was being developed and the past was being demolished.
“I think that the Maltese reader might be slightly puzzled – and even annoyed – by the depiction of the characters in the book, so I should say that even though some of the references to Malta came from memories of my father the actual characters are not based on real people or experience, but on imagination,” the author added.