Literature Festival Malta 2014

Malta Mediterranean Literature Festival 2014

Thursday 4 | Friday 5 | Saturday 6 September 2014

Msida Bastion Historic Garden, FLORIANA. 8.00 pm

The IXth edition of the Malta Mediterranean Literature Festival organized by Inizjamed will be held on Thursday 4th, Friday 5th and Saturday 6th September, at the Msida Bastion Historic Garden, in FLORIANA, with the participation of Noria Adel (Algeria), Clare Azzopardi (Malta), Antoine Cassar (Malta), Marc Delouze (France), Abdulrazak Gurnah (UK), Walid Nabhan (Malta), Bel Olid (Catalonia), Tomaž Šalamun (Slovenia), Peter Semolic (Slovenia) Marlene Saliba (Malta), Giacomo Sferlazzo (Lampedusa) and Anna Szabó (Hungary).

Entrance to all events is free. Short poetry films from Reel Festivals, and one directed by Kenneth Scicluna on two poems by Doreen Micallef and sponsored by the foundation Valletta 2018 will be shown during the festival.

The writers will be in Malta throughout the first week of September to take part in the LAF Malta Literary Translation Workshop. They will be translating each other’s works into their languages, and reading some of these translations during the three nights of the festival.

Two exciting Maltese bands Plato’s Dream Machine (Thursday) and Kantilena (Friday and Saturday) will be playing music from the albums they have just released, respectively Għera and Senduq.

The Festival coincides with the First Annual Valletta 2018 International Conference on Cultural Relations in Europe and the Mediterranean that aims to address aspects of contemporary cultural relations in the Mediterranean in the framework of Valletta as European Capital of Culture (ECoC). It is being held in collaboration with the University of Malta. The conference on Thursday 4th and Friday 5th September 2014 will be held at the Valletta Campus of the University and the keynote speakers will be the celebrated Maltese historian Prof. Henry Frendo and Prof. Mostafa Hassani-Idrissi, who edited the manual on the Mediterranean as part of Marseille 2013. One of the speakers will be the author, singer songwriter and human rights activist from Lampedusa, Giacomo Sferlazzo.

Books in Maltese published by Inizjamed and edited by Clare Azzopardi and Albert Gatt, Klijenti Antipatiċi u Kapuċċini Kesħin and Għaraq Xort’Oħra will once again be on sale at the festival venue.

The festival and literary translation workshop are part of the Literature Across Frontiers initiative, which has played a crucial role in the setting up and development of the annual workshop and festival which are now in their ninth year.

The 2014 edition of the Malta Mediterranean Literature Festival and LAF (Literature Across Frontiers with Alexandra Büchler) workshop are being held in collaboration with Valletta 2018, Din l-Art Ħelwa, Reel Festivals, Institut Ramon Lull, the European Commission Representation in Malta, Aġenzija Żgħażagħ, Għaqda tal-Malti – Università, the Small Initiatives Scheme under the Voluntary Organisations Fund, and the Malta Arts Fund.

To read more about previous Malta Mediterranean Literature Festivals and Inizjamed, please visit: www.inizjamed.org

Also see Towards a strategy for Literary Exchange and Translation in the Euro-Mediterranean Region in Malta 4 - 7 April 2013

***********************

In every festival, there are highlights. One of these moments came when Marc Delouze read his last poem called 'memoire'. In his brief introduction to the poem, he stated that there are inside of us memories we are not even conscious off, since these are the memories of the dead. It was a poem most appropriate for the location since a former cemetery with grave sites visible just behind the stage. *

Prior to reading that poem by standing on stage with a musical group accompanying him, he would sit amongst the audience at different locations to read his poems from there. It was magic: to see an empty stage and the voice coming from somewhere and yet only with time could he be detected sitting amongst the people who had come to listen to poetry and literary translations at their best in the warm evening air besides the port of Malta.

Then, one translator confessed that after having read the story of Bel Olid from Barcelona, he could not sleep. Strangely enough he went outside and took a newspaper to lie on as if an island of possible restless news. When he read the story, it became clear that Bel Olid had a strong voice with regards to what is happening to women. For the story describes a woman preparing meat balls. She is anxious since the husband may soon return home from work and he would be angry if the food is not ready on the table. In the room next door, the son is playing on the computer. Then the inevitable happens. The husband returns home earlier than expected but instead of being angry at her for not being ready, he goes up to her from behind and starts to rape her. While this is happening, and she bites into her finger till blood flows in which she tries to drown the pain while her other hand crushes the meat balls she was preparing, the boy in the room next door continues to play on the computer. Afterwards the man gives her a kiss on the cheeks and pulls up her pants underneath the skirt so as to let everything return to the resumption of normality. When discussing afterwards with the author what made her write such a story, she answered too much violence against women goes unnoticed. To underline this, she forwarded a poem of hers in which there lies an answer as to why many women remain silent after what happens to them all the time, and under which they suffer mostly for not speaking up in time.

There was the waiting and there was the fear.

The fear of waiting

and those long afternoons

when you knew

(you knew)

he’d come.

Every infinite gesture was repeated

in front of your eyes

now he’s taking your skirt off

now his moustache approaches

now he covers your mouth.

Infinite was the fear

and every ritual step

and every ounce of pain

and every time it had happened

was like an infinite film,

repeated.

There was the waiting and there was the fear.

He sometimes

(sometimes)

didn’t come.

Bel Olid

Note: there is an effort under way to create a Lit Hub in Malta thanks to the efforts of especially Alexandria Büchler of 'Literature Across Frontiers' which organised in 2013 a conference in Malta on Translation Strategies.

* Poem by Marc Delouze

Arraché

tu portes en toi tant de passé

de vies que tu n’as pas vécues

en toi pourtant assassinées

je voudrais me souvenir mais ne me souviens pas

avec la pioche ébréchée de mes mots je creuse

dans le tuf mou de ma mémoire

parfois un éclat d’anthracite explose

le temps s'effondre plus personne

pour rechercher nos corps nos dépouilles

reconnaître nos restes

arrachés

pétrifiés

inhumés dans l'éternité

que nous n'avons pas

creusée

le monde remué

ne change pas

cogne au vide qui l'entoure

le monde est un objet mou

le monde n'est pas un signe

le monde ne se lit pas

ne se déchiffre pas

la ville hurle comme d'habitude.

la folie coule à flots continus dans les rues

les veines du Vésuve

ouvertes les ombres

carbonisées

la dernière chaleur

la cité nous avale nous recrache

nous vomit

nous errons

dans la nuit des temps liquides

alignés ces mots torches dans le noir

tenues à bout de bras

chaque pas une phrase

ânonnée

trébuchée

je voudrais me souvenir mais ne me souviens pas

avec la pioche ébréchée de mes mots je creuse

dans le tuf mou de ma mémoire

suant de désir

de rage

parfois un éclat d’anthracite siffle dans

le silence

le champ de mines du silence

la jambe gauche de la vie explose

futur estropié

haché l'horizon

le soleil loin

vers d’autres rivages

pour d’autres visages

Traduction en Anglais du poème de Marc Delouze: Arraché

Première Traduction par Elise Billiard.

Torn out

you carry in you so much past

lives that you have not lived

in you however assassinated

I would like to remember but do not remember

with the chipped pickaxe of my words I dig

into the soft tuff of my memory

sometimes a splinter of anthracite blows up

time collapses no one anymore

to look for corpses, our skin

to recognize our remains

torn out

petrified

inhumed in eternity

which we have not

dig

the stirred world

does not change

bangs against the void that surrounds it

the world is a soft object

the world is not a sign

the world is not read

is not deciphered

the town howls as usual.

madness flows incessantly through the streets

the veins of the Vesuvius

open the shadows

carbonized

the last heat

the city swallows us spits us out

vomits us

we wander

in the liquid time immemorial

lined up these words torches in the dark

held at arm’s length

each step a phrase

fumbled

stumbled

I would like to remember but do not remember

with the chipped pickaxe of my words I dig

into the soft tuff of my memory

sweating of desire

of rage

sometimes a splinter of anthracite blows into

the silence

the minefields of silence

the left leg of life explodes

a future maimed

axed the horizon

the far away sun

towards other shores

for other faces.

Marc Delouze

Les Parvis Poétiques

01 42 54 48 70

www.parvispoetiques.fr

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Literature Festival Malta 2014