Appearance and trial and error
While it may seem astonishing that a language is only used by 460,000 people, or half a million if you include members of the diaspora, it is equally astonishing to note the extent to which literature occupies a central place in island culture. With its oral tradition, Maltese is one of the oldest living languages still in use - its origins date back to around the 9th century - and one of the most recent to have developed a formal orthography and grammar. Situated at the crossroads of civilizations, inhabited since prehistoric times, Malta has been ruled by an impressive number of peoples, even before the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem settled here in 1530. What remains of these successive occupations is a language that is as much Arabic as Italian, a fascinating agglomerate - still open to philological dispute - whose first written transcription, discovered by chance in 1966, is a simple leaflet that still retains its mysteries: Il-Kantilena, a cantilena of twenty verses attributed to Pietru Caxaro, who died around 1470.
Until then, the ancient Maltese language was already written in the Arabic alphabet, as evidenced by the work of the precursor poets and various notarial registers. In the 17th century, it would appear that Gian Francesco Buonamico (1639-1680), a doctor of the Order of Malta from Nantes, was the first to try his hand at translation, delivering his version of the French poem Le Grand-maître Cottoner. As the archipelago became Catholic, sacred writings were often used as a springboard. The first printed text in the Maltese edition was a bilingual Italian catechism produced in 1770 at the request of Archbishop Paolo Alpheran de Bussan. Twenty years earlier, it was also a churchman, Gian Pietro Francesco Agius de Soldanis, born in Gozo in 1712, who had tackled the thorny problem of transcribing his native language, relying on his knowledge of Latin whereas his worthy successor, Mikiel Anton Vassalli (1764-1829), relied in addition on his knowledge of Arabic, which he mastered perfectly.
This linguistic work led to the creation of a series of alphabets with fluctuating numbers of letters and spellings of different origins. Vassalli also contributed to the emergence of a genuine Maltese culture, collecting local aphorisms and sayings in one of his books. His most famous achievement, however, was his translation of the New Testament, which was unfortunately received posthumously, as it was only after his death that the Malta Bible Society published the work that had barely enabled him to survive. His grave, in the cemetery of the Msida bastion, bears a plaque so old that no one remembers having placed it, proclaiming him "Missier il-Lingwa Maltija", "father of the Maltese language", a title no one would dream of disputing.
Entry into Literature
Strictly speaking, it was the end of the 19th century that saw the emergence of a truly Maltese literature, in the wake of a trend that favored both writing talent and a certain patriotic claim, blending tragedy and heroism: Romanticism. It may be useful to recall that the country had been under English rule since 1800, and would remain so until independence in 1964, which explains why the national anthem - written by the "first national poet", Dun Karm Psaila (1871-1961) - would long be sung in both languages, even though its author, like the writer Frangisk Saver Caruana to whom the first Maltese novel, Inez Farrug, published in 1889, is attributed, advocated a language as free as possible from external additions.
This view was not shared by Ninu Cremona, the playwright famous for his Il-Fidwa tal-Bdiewa(The Liberation of the Peasants) and Vassalli's biographer, who, on the contrary, saw in the fusion of vocables a faithful rendering of a country and a spirit founded on many foreign contributions. Lively exchanges between literati took place in the columns of the newspaper Il-Habib as early as 1920, and from this effervescence sprang the Maltese Writers' Association, the future Academy, and a commission charged with defining an official alphabet and grammar. The latter would not be recognized by the colonial government until 14 years later.
If the debates were fertile for the evolution of the language, they were also fertile for literature, and marked the gradual emergence of a new movement, Realism. After the return to the roots and the search for a common identity, came the time for social criticism, as Gwann Mamo (1886-1947) excelled at in his satire Les Enfants de grand-mère Venut en Amérique, which met with great success. The sharp pen of Manwel Dimech (1860-1921), who founded the Association des Éclairés, cost him forced exile and an anonymous grave in Egypt, as his desire for social reform in favor of women, children and workers did not please either the clergy or the British. However, it is said that the colonial power decided to take into consideration the demands of the natives, at least in terms of literature, no doubt in a desire to appease them. The language, which had taken so long to become official, was now being encouraged, and in 1935 the government set up a competition open to novelists, from which Ġużè Aquilina emerged as the winner.
The floodgates were opened and the ink never stopped flowing, but although independence was achieved in 1964, the debates continued. In 1966, a new polemic erupted in the press, pitting the "ancients" against the "moderns", led by a number of authors including Charles Coleiro, Lillian Sciberras, Joseph Camilleri... Out of these necessarily political sparks came a literary prize in 1974, the very year the Republic was proclaimed, created in collaboration with Rothmans and awarded for his novel Samuraj to one of the most brilliant writers of his generation, Frans Sammut (1945-2011). In 2004, Maltese took the decisive step of being recognized as one of the official languages of the European Union, which will hopefully enable international translations.
