Alfred Sant translated his epic novel. He doubts anyone will read it

Packed bookshelves as high as the ceiling cover three walls of his Birkirkara office, where Alfred Sant is seated to speak about his most recent endeavour: self-translating one of his longest and earliest novels into English.

Next to the former prime minister and novelist is a desk that overflows with documents and even more books.

The recently published Snow on Comino (2026), originally titled Silġ fuq Kemmuna (1982), is 780 pages long. It took Sant two years to translate the Maltese-language book. However, despite the effort, Sant said he was not expecting many people to read it.

“People no longer have the patience to read. I recently saw an article about it, about how reading is becoming a niche hobby, just like stamp collecting. I do not think the book [Snow on Comino] will be read but, for me, it was a challenge. Writing remains. Even if it is not read, it remains there.”

Snow on Comino was published in 1982 but was, in fact, written much earlier, between 1970 and 1973, a few years after Malta gained independence in 1964.

Sant, who was working as a diplomat abroad when he wrote the novel, described the period as one of profound change. “It was a time of great flux. There was fear about what the future would look like as the British services were leaving and other industries, such as tourism, were taking shape.”

Alfred Sant. File photo

Greater awareness of what was happening abroad, free university tuition and teacher-training colleges also meant greater exposure to new ideas, he said.

“There was also the fight, or, perhaps, the better word is conflict, regarding the Catholic Church and Catholic norms,” Sant said.

“Slowly, the closed-off life of that time was being challenged,” he said.

But all that context is in the background of the novel.

Snow on Comino looks at the lives of four young people and the ways their lives intersect.

Most of the book’s 18 chapters are told from the perspectives of the four main characters: two men and two women.

One character wants to do everything in life, is lazy but, somehow, manages to succeed. Another wants a conventional life but only to a certain extent, while another, who is slightly older, illustrates the openness that had begun, Sant said.

The character whose perspective is introduced in the first chapter, Bernard, “wants to rebel but knows he is facing a dead end”, Sant said. That mentality is captured by the character’s decision to place a small bomb outside a bank in the first few pages of the novel. “It shows frustration, or Maltese nihilism, an anonymous protest,” he said.

Sant said he was inspired by the writing style of a French literary movement of the 1950s and 1960s, the nouveau roman. The style includes describing what a character is thinking as he experiences events but in a concrete manner.

“In fact, the novel goes from the character’s mind to the action, back to the mind and back to the memory. That game is constantly taking place.”

Imagery

Sant said the book has “sentences that never end”, so translating it was especially hard. “I did not want to do what some translators do, good as they are, by breaking up those sentences... Sometimes you have to do it but I tried to avoid it and keep the original sequence.”

Another challenge Sant encountered when translating the book was retaining a “Maltese atmosphere” in English without writing something that sounded like “Maltese-English”.

Translating similes was another challenge, he admitted.

“It is about finding a balance. Much of our imagery is that of the Mediterranean. When you translate it into English, should you keep the same imagery or use imagery from the north?” Sant said he tried to retain Maltese ideas and scenes as much as he could.

Sant finished his first works in the mid-1960s, including Min Hu Evelyn Costa?, a play, and L-Ewwel Weraq tal-Bajtar, Sant’s first novel. Since then, Sant has not stopped writing, even publishing works while he was leader of the opposition and prime minister.

“My calculation is that I have written some 10 million words in my life,” Sant said. “You find the time. If you really want to do something, you do it... For some reason, I always wanted to write.”

Sant said he had always loved writing, even from infancy. “I did not know how to write but I used to see my father, or maybe someone else, writing in a notebook and I would do the same, scribbling on the pages,” he said.

While many of his novels, including Snow on Comino, were initially written by hand, Sant said he had long since converted to using a computer. “First of all, whenever I write something, I do so three times. Before, my first draft was in longhand, then again in longhand but the third version was typed. Then, I began typing everything, and, now, I write straight on the computer. There are still always three versions, however,” he said.

Besides works of fiction, Sant has published several books on politics and two volumes of his memoirs. He is currently working on his third volume, which will cover his life between 1992, when he took over the Labour Party leadership, and 1998, when, as prime minister, he called a snap election amid discord with then-MP Dom Mintoff, and lost.

Snow on Comino is on sale at leading bookstores. Launch events will be announced soon.