At 82 years, Achille Mizzi must be the oldest, or one of the oldest, poets in Malta, a number sadly depleted by the recent death of Oliver Friggieri.
He started writing poetry at a very early age in 1964, when Guze’Aquilina included a poem by him in an anthology of poems in Maltese. Subsequent anthologies were to include more and more poems by him.
The 1960s were the years when the Maltese literary scene experienced a growth and flourishing reflecting the new sense of sovereignty as a result of Malta’s attainment of independence in 1964.
Mizzi was one of the founder-members of the Moviment Qawmien Letterarju which was spearheading this revival and he became the Moviment’s president for a number of years.
He began his career as a teacher but in 1988 joined the Ministry of Education and Culture. In 1994 he was appointed as Secretary to the President and he kept this post under both President Ugo Mifsud Bonnici and President Guido de Marco, retiring in 2000.
He has published no less than eight books of poetry, the first being L-Ghar ta’ l-Enimmi in 1967 and the last one being the book under review here.
This book is a collaborative effort between the author and the late Peter Serracino Inglott with the latter translating Mizzi’s poems in Maltese to English.
In his introduction to this book, Professor Serracino Inglott wrote that Mizzi’s poems are very difficult to reproduce in translation. “indeed the lexical complexity of the judiciously balanced Semitic and Romance terms is impossible to reproduce except in a very general way by a balancing of the Germanic and the Latin elements of the English language. The prime objective of the translator has to be the echoing in the most effective possible way of the written version of the original.”
With that qualification in mind, here is PSI’s translation of the first stanza of the poem ‘Marche Slave’:
When I ride naked
Bareback on the cloven hoofed beasts,
With spit dripping from my pursed lips,
Swearing by the gods who thunder
Across the boundless heavens over the steppe,
I become Slavonic.
No reins, no ropes for me,
No girdles, no belts,
No yoke on my back,
No bridle in my mouth, no cage for my thoughts.
Harnessed by my command
I restrain fifty beasts,
With their cloven hoof
Drumming on earth’s womb,
Five hundred, five thousand,
Unleashed, unchecked, wide-open eyed,
Reflecting a myriad stars.
Drum skins burst
Maidens deflowered,
I become Slavonic.
