Norbert Bugeja
- Malta -
Norbert Bugeja is Associate Professor in Postcolonial Studies within the Department of English and Director of the Mediterranean Institute at the University of Malta. He is the author of three poetry collections in Maltese, each of them shortlisted for the National Book Prize for Poetry: Insa li Mhijiex Hawn (Klabb Kotba Maltin, 2021), Nartiċi (Klabb Kotba Maltin, 2016) and Bliet (Edizzjonijiet Emma Delezio, 2009), as well as two collections in English translation, South of the Kasbah (Midsea Books, 2015, translated by Irene Mangion), and Stay, Fairy Tale, Stay! Memoirs of a City Cast Adrift (Midsea Books / Inizjamed, 2005, translated by Maria Grech Ganado). Most recently, his poetry book Oublie qu’Elle n’est Pas Là appeared in France from Les Presses du Réel — Al Dante. His work has appeared across major international journals, literary magazines, anthologies, edited volumes and at various international literature festivals and conferences. His poetry has been translated into various languages. He is General Editor of the Journal of Mediterranean Studies and a member of the international advisory council of the Anna Lindh Foundation.
Two decades after the tragic demise of his mother, Norbert Bugeja reached into the fraught silences of time to summon forth the echoes of a conversation that ended abruptly, in the midst of one summer afternoon. The outcome of this writing project was Bugeja’s nationally acclaimed collection, Insa li Mhijiex Hawn (‘Forget that She’s Not Here’), which was subsequently published in France by Les Presses du Réel - Al Dante (2023), and in Arabic by Editions Arabesques - Sheen (2023).
In this intense collection, poetry returns as a language stolen from the erosion of memory: letters of salt burning in the flesh of remembrance, the ephemeral syllables of a nation that persists on the cliff-edge of disrupted youth, half of an island scratched into the morning sand. Bugeja rummages in sequences of rhythm, metaphor, image and synaesthesia to capture the mood of years that never took place, and ones that may never be lived. What emerges is an elegy built from the surviving marks of a complex female persona. Bugeja engages with her voice by letting speak for themselves those places she lived in or passed through, in her life as in his reveries. Over a long quest for a distinct poetic style, Bugeja creates a sequence of moments in which forgetting, as much as remembrance, becomes a condition for surviving among the ruins of an interrupted bond.
These poems invite us on an alluring journey across anxious spaces of memory, re-written here by one of the foremost Mediterranean poetic voices of his generation.
Bugeja began writing in the last years of the twentieth century, which were also the early years of the New Wave generation of Maltese poets. Over the past two decades, his work has come to be considered as a major corpus of poetry in the new literature of Malta. His first collection, Bliet (Cities, Edizzjonijiet Emma Delezio, 2009) established the voice of a cosmopolitan poetry whose persona speaks from a Mediterranean poetics of encounter. These early poems, together with the poems published in Bugeja’s second collection Nartiċi (‘Narthex’, Klabb Kotba Maltin, 2016) invoke the impressions, faces, spaces, images and people encountered across various ports and other cities of the region and the broader Mediterranean echoes in the world, from Istanbul to Tangier and Tunis, from Nicosia to Rome and the Andalusian cities, from Valletta to Busan, to the Indonesian coastlines, and further afield.
In the Maltese language, Bugeja often writes in the hendecasyllabic verse, a traditional verse composed of eleven syllables that Bugeja finds versatile enough to fuse with contemporary thematics and concerns. Bugeja uses such devices as synaesthesia to render intimate impressions of spaces and personae that seek to unlearn the barriers between notions of territory, time, space geographic as well as cultural frontiers. The effect is that of a poetry that appeals at once to the multiple sensory capability of the mind, and a profound dive into the less overt or immediately graspable dimensions of the subconscious.
Bugeja’s poetry is, also, often addressed at another persona, a female figure whose presence speaks back to the reader and enriches the layered, conversational thrust of these poems. In a comment about Bugeja’s poetry, Maltese poet laureate Maria Grach Ganado has opined that ‘What strikes me most about Norbert Bugeja’s poetry … is the elusive image of a woman in a composite space that is itself constructed by impressions which global experiences have left on the author. It is the same with the concept of Time which is not pinned down specifically in a particular sequence despite the particular yearning of memory. The poems evoke in me a response, interpretation, mood, atmosphere that verge on inexpressible emotions. I find Bugeja’s poems heart-rending also because of the beauty in the lyricism of his verses.’
Poetry
-
14:00 [Return] / 14:00 [Ritorn]
-
Memento Mori / Memento Mori
-
Notes from an Amphitheatre / Noti minn Anfiteatru
-
Arabesque / Arabesca
-
Ledra / Ledra
-
Stamboul / Stamboul
-
South of the Kasbah / Fin-Nofsinhar tal-Kasba
-
Midday at Santa Maria de las Cuevas / Fil-Monasteru ta’ Santa Maria de las Cuevas, wara Nofsinhar
-
Requiem for the Remains / Requiem, Għal Dak Li Baqa’
-
Sunset on the Guadalquivir / Inżul ix-Xemx fuq il-Guadalquivir
