Professor Anthony (Toni) Aquilina’s annotated translation into Maltese of Annie Ernaux’s famous French short novel Passion Simple / Passjoni Sempliċi has just been published to coincide with this year’s semaine de la francophonie, as well as the Book Festival on Campus.
Passjoni Sempliċi is the confession of an anonymous mother who, months after the end of her liaison with a Russian Embassy high official in Paris, uses her pen as a substitute for her loss.
There are various levels of loss in this narrative: the real physical loss of the lover, the narrator’s perte de soi, consumed as she was in a passion which turns out to be more complicated than the title of the book suggests, and the memories of other types of losses along the way.
Passjoni Sempliċi is a Faraxa publication. Prof Aquilina is a member of the Department of Translation, Terminology and Interpreting Studies within the Faculty of Arts at the University of Malta.