As the Malta Mediterranean Literature Festival enters its 17th edition, JEAN PAUL BORG speaks with Lara Zammit about what the annual event has in store.

LZ: Inizjamed’s upcoming Malta Mediterranean Literature Festival will mark its 17th edition this year. What can you tell us about the history of the festival and what it has aimed to achieve?

JPB: The festival started thanks to the belief of Maria Grech Ganado that Inizjamed joins the network of Literature Across Frontiers thanks to her faith in Maltese literature.

Adrian Grima recounts that the formula at the very beginning was simple, almost elementary, providing a space for authors from different languages and literatures meet up and translating each other. This led to enrich each other’s work since the original work developed in a creative process.

The achievement is that this process drove the festival to be a space where people from different locations, different backgrounds, meet, discuss and create something beautiful together. The very beginning of the festival might have started in closed spaces, but since its early years, the audience has become an integral part of it.

Literature needs readers, a festival needs an audience. At times you can forget the importance of the audience, but the pandemic reminded us of this starkly – online events could never replace the joy and magic of sharing a physical space with others and live the tension of witnessing something happening in front of your naked eye unfiltered.

The fact that the Palk Ħieles, the Open Mic has now become a staple of the festival is another evidence of this – last year we had to play very safe and downscaled our festival, however the Palk Ħieles, whereby anyone can share their work with others was not sacrificed.

Ultimately, the festival is a celebration of different literatures, different languages, different cultures in the delightful Fort St Elmo, enabling the audience to have a drink, snack, buy books, listen to live bands, and experience different authors’ works together.

LZ: What makes this upcoming 17th edition particular? What events/literary activities do you have in store?

JPB: Each edition is unique, the different line-up of authors ensures this. This year we will have Adrian Grima, one of the co-founders of the festival who will be on stage as an invited author for the first time, and that is very special to us. It feels like the festival has gone through a whole circle.

We will be also welcoming a poet from Ukraine for the first time – Julia Musaskovska. We had to acknowledge the courage of this poet who will be travelling from a war-torn country by asking fellow Ukrainian artist Ira Melkonyan to create something special to accompany her and she came with the idea of a music-sound-performance intervention with her poetry, with the participation of a Ukrainian singer and the translated Maltese poetry.

We will have a discussion at the theatre of Spazju Kreattiv called On the Border of Conflict moderated by James Debono and with a panel of three of the invited authors.

Language is a ferocious creature that refuses to be tamed and always has the last word- Abdelfattah Kalito

On the same night, the Spanish EUPL winner Jacobo Bergareche will be interviewed by David Schembri. For the first time we will be holding a live masterclass – The Golden Shovel Poem Masterclass to be run by one of the invited authors, Bella Cox.

The audience is getting ever more in the thick of the festival, and on the same day we will have the Palk Ħieles. Everything will then conclude at Fort St Elmo on Friday and Saturday, with the participation of four authors every night presenting us their work, and their translations, we will have different languages intermingling on stage, and literature flirting with music.

Beyond all this, the participation of different authors whom we will see for the first time will ensure that we will look at things from a new angle. I am sure these authors will defamiliarise even the mundane and give us new perspectives and new sensations.

LZ: Translation appears to have been a central feature of the literature festival over the years, especially given that the festival draws from literature from the greater span of the Mediterranean. Can you comment on the practice of translation and its place in the festival? 

JPB: Claudia Gauci, Inizjamed’s president, remarked in her programme message that translation is what joins up all the ends of the festival – the bridge between different points.

It is a technique that uses language to its limits since, as Abdelfattah Kalito remarks, language is a ferocious creature that refuses to be tamed and always has the last word. In a translation, languages tug and quarrel with each other, but it is what ultimately makes foreign literatures accessible and lets us understand each other better.

The festival is a celebration of different literatures, languages and cultures.

The translation workshop is at the heart of the festival, for a few days different authors live together and finalise their translations of each other face to face. It is a delight not afforded to many translators, and a process that allows friendships and connections to flourish, which go beyond the festival.

As much as we bring foreign literature to our shores, Maltese literature beats the boundaries of our smallness. 

This year, it is also special, since we will be publishing Xtaqt li kont merkurju (Wishing I were a mercury) – an anthology edited by Kit Azzopardi, Claudia Gauci and Justine Somerville – all core members of Inizjamed – featuring poetry translated to Maltese through all the years of the festival.

The Malta Mediterranean Literature Festival is taking place between August 26 and 27 at Fort St Elmo, Valletta. The festival is supported by the Arts Council Malta and is also collaborating with Creative Europe Desk – Malta, the National Book Council, Heritage Malta and Literature Across Frontiers. For more information, visit inizjamed.org.