The name Prosper Grech might not have been on everybody’s lips before it was announced that the eminent professor was being made cardinal. Still, there is at least one event that goes back 50 years that is worth recalling for its own sake and for the benefit of contemporary students of Maltese literature who may not be aware of its existence.

In 1961, Cambridge University Press published Dun Karm: Poet of Malta, a collection of 37 poems by Dun Karm, selected and translated into English by A.J. Arberry, professor of Arabic at Cambridge University.

Mgr Grech wrote 52-page intro to book

The value of the anthology was greatly enhanced by Mgr Grech’s 52-page introduction, which gives what Arberry himself describes as “a luminous account of the history of Maltese poetry and of Dun Karm’s predominant part in that history”.

In the concluding paragraph of that introduction, Mgr Grech wrote that Dun Karm “will never cease to be a criterion for the use of language in Maltese literature. Styles may change but beauty of diction will always be measured against Dun Karm’s use of words because, in him, as in Shakespeare, one can appreciate the full beauty of the language”.

Those words are as true and as important now as they were when they were written.