This feature was meant to publicise the first Maltese woman who translated a literary text into Maltese. Instead, it has turned into a narrative of the persistent difficulties and frustrations a researcher encounters in chasing a chimera. More than anything, it confirms how mean history has been in the exposure of women and their memory.

It was the year 1874 when Giovanni Papanti determined to launch singlehandedly a grand literary project, to commemorate the fifth centenary of the death of Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375), the father of Italian prose-writing. Italy then still glowed in the patriotic aftermath of the Risorgimento, of freedom and unification.

A late medieval French miniature of The Decameron.

Papanti (1830-1893), a reputable scholar and bibliographer from Livorno, opted for something big – a translation of one of Boccaccio’s novellas into all the known dialects of Italy, and into foreign languages spoken in Italy. He commissioned a large army of regional scholars to provide the translations. Many of those dialects, he averred, had already started fading, and he wanted the evidence preserved.

When it came to the choice of an extract from Boccaccio’s prose works to serve as the common text on which all the translations in dialect had to be based, Papanti faced a dilemma. Boccaccio’s masterpiece, the Decameron, enjoyed a rather problematic reputation. Since 1558 it had languished on the Inquisition’s Index of Prohibited Books. Quite coincidentally, Boccaccio’s European reputation was partly due to a knight of Malta, Fra Pietro Bembo, a prominent writer himself and the lover of Lucrezia Borgia, radiant daughter of a lascivious pope, Alexander VI.

That classic collection of novellas revolved around ten youths, seven men and three women, taking refuge in the countryside outside Florence to escape the ravages of the 1348 plague. To while away the monotony of their self-inflicted quarantine, at night-time each of the youths narrates a story – a hundred in all over ten days. Many of these tales recounted genteel, even erotic, obscenity, bawdy or rumbustious episodes. And Papanti, fully paid-up member of the prudes brigade, stresses in the Foreword that he deliberately homed on one of the most sanitized and edifying - the ninth novella of the first evening.

Elissa, one of the aristocratic young women in isolation, recounted how a noble lady from Gascony stopped in Cyprus on her way back from a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. In the island she was gang-raped by some lawless toughs. She thought of seeking justice from Guy of Lusignan, ruler of Cyprus (1192-1194), known for his cowardly indifference and sloth. Everyone dissuaded her, as the indolent king had the reputation of turning the other cheek even when the outrage targeted him personally. The victim of rape devised an ingenious way of awaking the conscience of the king, who henceforth dispensed justice with unsuspected vigour.

By the end of the year, Papanti had collected over 700 translations of the same novella into most of the dialects spoken in Italy, ranging from the topmost north to the extreme south of Sicily. Each translator signed his or her name in full. The editor had his magnum opus printed in Livorno in 1875 in a volume 760 pages long, to coincide with Boccaccio’s death in Certaldo, Tuscany, 500 years earlier.

An antique portrait of Giovanni Boccaccio by Andrea del Castagno.

The patriot Papanti, in his encyclopaedic volume, also included translations into various Italian dialects spoken in lands considered as Italia Irredenta, then still under foreign rule, inhabited by majorities of ethnic Italians – Trento, Trieste, Nice, Sud Tyrol, Corsica, Canton Ticino, Fiume, Gorizia, Savoy. Curiously, he also included translations into six non-Italian languages spoken in Italy – Albanian, Arabic, Greek, Romanian, Slavic and German.

And here comes the first surprise for a Maltese reader – the ‘Arabic’ translation is not Arabic at all - it is in perfect Maltese. And it carries the name of the author in full: Jane Dalzel Onofrio. Both the Onofrio and the Dalzel surnames have known connections to nineteenth century Malta, a fact which, I believed, would make the profiling of Jane an easy task. So I naïvely taught. How wrong I was. All the avenues I first explored led triumphantly nowhere.

Double-barrelled surnames, in the nineteenth century, mostly characterised families striving to seem upwardly mobile, perhaps because the second surname sounded more impressive. Married women too, who took their husbands’ surname, sometimes also tagged on to it their original family name.

I started with the Onofrios. They came from Valletta and have been recorded in Malta at least since 1590 when Ferdinando Onofrio married Donna Aloisia Platamone and had, among his grandchildren, Argentina Onofrio who in 1656 married the Englishman John Watt (or Watts, in old Maltese records often Giovanni Vuat), descendant of the consul for Flanders in Malta and of the earliest glass blowers in the island. The Onofrio surname may now be extinct locally.

An English edition of Boccaccio’s most renowned work, The Decameron.

In the 19^th century, two Onofrios stood out of dreary anonymity – the brothers Luigi and Paolo, sons of Notary Giuseppe. Luigi graduated as a lawyer on August 9, 1839,[1] and, literally days later, on September 1, the government appointed him as the first syndic for Birkirkara with the obligation to reside in the village.[2] The new office of syndic, created in 1839, replaced the previous one of Deputy-Lieutenant and was essentially a position of trust reserved for those who cosied up to the colonial authorities.

Syndics exercised judicial civil duties in petty litigation, had police responsibilities and were to report to the central government “all extraordinary occurrences” in their district. They enjoyed a yearly salary of eighty pounds sterling, plus another ten pounds for ‘horse hire’[3]. Shortly later, on April 28, 1840, the syndic married Teresa Pajas in the Porto Salvo, St Domenic parish, Valletta.            .

Luigi’s brother Paolo, worked as clerk to the Militia Office and to the Board for the Control of the Lighting of Towns. Joining the civil service in 1852, he earned twenty pounds a year.[4] He married Caterina Camilla Satariano in Birkirkara, on April 27, 1854. Several 19^th century applications by Onofrios for passports to Egypt survive.

In 2002 a new road was named in Luigi’s honour in Swatar.[5] Unable to unearth anything significant about him, in dejection I approached the Government Street Naming Committee to see if their files revealed any further info. Very courteously they replied in the negative. In the official Civil Establishment of dependents for 1853 Luigi still appears as syndic.

Other records also mention a Giovanna Onofrio aged 69, widow of the Registrar of the Court of Special Commission. She was, in 1862, still receiving a pension of forty pounds a year first granted in 1831.[6] No joy so far.

I switched to the Dalzels. They appear quite prominent within the ranks of UK civil servants and merchants who almost literally flooded Malta as soon as the British connection was established after the expulsion of the French in 1800.  The first recorded Dalzel in Malta, the Scotsman Archibald Dalziel, was appointed Magistrate and Collector of Revenue in Gozo, where he died on March 3, 1818.[7] Before settling in Malta he had been Governor of the Gold Coast[8], and a notable, if unsuccessful, slave trader.  He ended bankrupt and changed his name to Dalzel. He must have been among the many hangers-on of British politicians, mostly incompetent failures for whom the politicos sough to find lucrative jobs in the colonies because they were unemployable in the UK, “penniless, or worse, in debt”.[9]

Some other Dalzels we know by name: Edward Dalzel (1784 – 1828) son of Archibald, who lodged at (and ran his business from) his government-owned house at No 103, Strada San Giovanni, Valletta, whose basement is today the Kantina Café. And Andrew Dalzel, who opened a school in Valletta which by 1822 fared badly and headed towards insolvency -because, he pleads, poverty had become so widespread in Malta, that pupils were unable to afford tuition fees. And George Dalzel, agent for the United Kingdom Life Insurance Company established at No 225, Strada Reale, Valletta.[10] Two Dalzels eventually became Magistrates.

George Dalzel left some ripples in the chronicles of the island. Teaming up with Charles Gingell in 1841, for several years their firm enjoyed a virtual monopoly of public sales by auction in Malta. By direct order, the firm Dalzel & Gingell handled most government sales by auction.

And George Dalzel remained notorious in 1840 for dragging through the criminal courts his young Maltese wife, Margaret Semini, who he had married in her middle teens on April 19, 1829. He charged her with adultery and had her imprisoned indefinitely, “during his pleasure”. I wrote quite extensively about this heart-wrenching episode. [11]

George, born July 23, 1804, for some time, lived at No 117/118 Strada Stretta, and at No 2, Strada Alessando, Valletta, and had at least two children by his wife Margaret Semini: Charles Shaw, (born c.  1832, died in Birkirkara August 4, 1889) who took up his father’s occupation as auctioneer - and his sister Jane. 

A Martha Jane Dalzel, an American Protestant missionary, appears in Malta in 1832 and marries another Protestant missionary, the Rev. Elias Briggs. She cannot be the elusive Dalzel Onofrio we are trying to capture.

A marble monument to Giovanni Boccaccio erected in Florence.

Does any of this bring us any closer to our elusive Jane Dalzel Onofrio? With the help of Clive Sammut, light belatedly flashed at the end of a long and pitch-dark tunnel. He discovered the marriage, on November 28, 1850, celebrated in the church of Santa Caterina d’Italia within the Parish of St Paul, Valletta, between the Sicilian Rosario Onofrio from Messina, and Jane Dalzel, daughter of the notorious George Dalzel and his wife, the reviled and dishonoured Margaret Semini.  Jane’s father George died shortly later, on July 1, 1852, twenty-three years before Jane published her Boccaccio translation in Maltese.

Still more enigmatic than Jane, appears her husband Rosario, a Sicilian who, together with many other outcasts, took refuge in Malta after the 1848 failed uprising against the Bourbon monarchy in Sicily.  On the island Rosario endeared himself with and gained the trust of some prominent Italian conspirators, who counted on Rosario’s boast that his brother Giuseppe had the right contacts with the leading printers in Switzerland and arms dealers in London.

On May 22, 1851, Onofrio signed a formal agreement with six other Italian exiles in Malta: Luigi Pellegrino, Salvatore Caltabiano, Luigi Milanesi, Sicilian but born in Malta, Giacomo Navarra-Bivona, Pasquale Calvi and Benedetto Zuccarelli. Being unaware of or disregarding the unsavoury past (i tristi antecedent) of Rosario Onofrio, in Sicily a professional pimp, procurer of whores (mezzano di mestiere), the patriots placed at his disposal a large sum of money for the purchase in London of rifles and officers’ sabres. They never saw the weapons or the money again, with the result that an interminable blame-game rifted the conspirators. Rosario claimed he had never actually received the money.[12]

In 1854, Onofrio found himself involved in Malta in una dolorosa polemica about money matters with another patriot and exile, Antonino Miloro.[13] Sordid details of these turbulent misadventures are given by Pasquale Calvi in a full-length book published anonymously in London in 1856. He never misses an occasion to broadcast his scathing contempt for the Maltese judiciary, the legal system and profession. Described as ‘of exceptional intelligence’, Garibaldi appointed Calvi President of the Supreme Court of Justice. It was he who formally proclaimed the annexation of Sicily to the newly formed Kingdom of Italy in 1860. He lived in exile in Malta for eleven years.

After the liberation of Sicily and the unification of Italy, the fresh Onofrio couple, Rosario and Jane, very likely settled in Messina. The National Archives in Rabat house an application by Jane’s tarnished mother, Margaret née Semini, for a passport to travel to Messina on July 18, 1863.

Jane used Maltese quite adroitly. She wrote at a time when orthography had not yet standardized, in a homely, almost artless, mixture of Semitic and Italianized words, avoiding anything derived from English. What errors the text exhibits are obvious typos which the Italian printer misread from a text handwritten in an unfamiliar and mysterious language. So ‘she wept’ appears as tibehi instead of tibchi/tibki; danch/dauch/dawk; nitghalum/nitghalem; innilliha/inhalliha. She paraphrased ‘she was violated’ as: chienet min x rgiel hziena offisa u mcasbra b’ maniera l’ actar vili.

Why is she important? For at least two reasons. Jane is the very first Maltese woman, known so far, to translate a foreign text into her native language. And quite likely, she is also the first Maltese woman to render literature in Maltese.

At least one other woman had translated Maltese into a European language before her, but she was a foreigner. Mary Illif, a British stage actress separated from her husband, came to Malta in 1818, and that year published a collection of verse in the local Government Printing Press which included two lyrics translated from Maltese into English, one a hymn in praise of Malta and another a love poem.[14] Governor Sir Thomas Maitland purchased fifty copies of her book. What she gave the lecherous boozer in return remains anybody’s guess.

I just trust some other researcher will encounter kindlier fortune in fleshing further the Dalzel Onofrio ghost, precious and unique. 

Acknowledgements

My thanks to Edoardo Winspeare and Michael Lowell who introduced me to this research, and to Leonard Callus, Melvin Caruana, Maria Pia Critelli, Christopher Deguara, Adrian Grima, Anthony Mifsud, Clive Sammut, Noel Toledo, Clare Vassallo and Olvin Vella for their generous assistance.

This is a revised and updated version of the text.