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Interviews
“In this sense, the role of the poet is like the
role of
the prophet: to speak from a place of truth in affective language. That's what H.D. did. Not to
mythologize her—she was a very complex person—but artistically she was very courageous,
and that is
what I admire in her and in fearless poets and artists today. It seems to me that we need more not
less fearlessness, by which I mean intellectual and emotional courage. To reiterate H.D., we need
to counter hate with love in any way possible. You can see in the novel the way shock took H.D.
out beyond her self to a larger story, a larger version of the self's story through and beyond
time. We don't need to believe in reincarnation to come to the conclusion that human evolution
must be heartfelt, that the psyche must evolve for the planet to survive us.” An interview with
Cynthia Hogue by Rebecca Seiferle
Cynthia's Under Erasure as in: Sign (Silence)
Cynthia's notes and introduction to an excerpt from H.D.'s The Sword Went Out to Sea
“What I have learned, besides the anguish of trying to carry a long text from language to
language, which is something like trying to carry a handful of water over rough terrain—it
just keeps leaking—is that translating or being translated is one of the most intimate
conversations one can have about poetry. As a translator, you learn more about the poem than you
could in any other way. As a translatee, likewise, you explain things about the poem you would
never otherwise explain to anyone, even yourself. In either position, you feel you've written a
whole new poem, a whole new book on top of the poem or the book that was written.” An interview
with Eleni Sikelianos
by Melissa Buckheit.
Excerpt from Eleni's Body Clock
Third Night from Eleni's translation of
Jacques Roubaud's Exchanges on Light
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Malta Feature
Maltese Literature — The New Writing
“The term 'Maltese Literature' normally refers to literature written in the Maltese language,
a Semitic language that owes its birth to the arrival of the Arabs on Malta in 870AD and that was
subsequently heavily influenced by Italian, Sicilian and more recently English. Some Maltese authors
do write in other languages, especially English, but most Maltese would identify Maltese literature
with authors who have written exclusively or mainly in Maltese.”
By Adrian Grima
Post-Independence Maltese Poetry —An Overview
“Interrogating the inherited value of signs is also typical of that Maltese poetry
challenging a gendered discourse from a feminist viewpoint, and appearing at a later
phase of Maltese post-independence poetry. Among other woman writers comprising
Rena Balzan, Doreen Micallef Chritien, Lilian Sciberras, and Marlene Saliba,
Maria Grech Ganado offers a distinctive ability to evoke and disrupt the
physical, emotional, and social discourse in which womanhood is encoded.
Wordplay, syllepsis (a word applied to two other words in different senses),
and antanaclasis (the repetition of a word with different meanings in the same context)
occur at key points in her poetry to unveil the semantic instability of biological terms
that crucially differentiate female roles.”
By Bernard Micallef
Contemporary Writing Scene in Malta
“I think that if we look at the Maltese scene now, we can state with conviction that
never has there been so much literary ferment in the Maltese islands since the sixties.
The sixties had broken with the themes and influence of the first wave of national,
religious and sentimental love which dogged the first appearance of poetry in the
Maltese language — and had replaced it with a political and existential wave,
inspired by the rest of Europe, which addressed the former themes from a confrontational
perspective.”
By Maria Grech Ganado
Contemporary Maltese Poetry
Edited by
Maria Grech Ganado
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Chapbooks
Arc
by Melissa Buckheit
Blue Field
by Maria Grech Ganado
Excerpt from The Sword Went Out to Sea (Synthesis of a Dream)
A Novel by Delia
Alton
by H.D.
Under Erasure as in: Sign (Silence)
by Cynthia Hogue
A Handful of Leaves
by Immanuel Mifsud
Third Night
by Jacques Roubaud
Excerpt from Body Clock
by Eleni Sikelianos
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