Dr Norbert Bugeja has been awarded the sum of € 5,000 for the translation into English of a collection of fifty of his poems, that will be published next year under the title of South of the Kasbah.
The collection emerges from a body of work Dr Bugeja has written over the past ten years. The funds were awarded by the Malta Arts Fund after a competitive process, as part of the Fund’s Spreading Words funding strand for the translation and dissemination of the literature of Malta into other languages. The poetry will be translated by Irene Mangion – a professional translator who, having also travelled extensively for many years, shares a reading taste and a fascination for many of the cities that have inspired this collection.
The poems in South of the Kasbah consist of a series of highly visual impressions garnered from maritime cities and ports of call from across the Mediterranean littoral. In a relatively novel approach for the literature of Malta, the poems divert the traditional endekasillabu verse form from its conventional usage in Maltese literature to explore the urban imaginary of these Mediterranean haunts, their people and their stories. This is a poetry of contamination, of flashes of deep intimacy obtained from a sideways glance, a trodden cigarette stub, a suburban caress, a blasphemy uttered over a half-empty beer-can. As such, these poems imprint poignant situations captured in the alleys and peripheral regions of Alexandria, Istanbul, Valletta, Tangier, Marrakesh, Andalusia, Birgu, Beirut, Rome, Sanlucar de Barrameda, Montpellier, Catalunya and other locations around the littoral.