Finnegan’s List 2017

Click to access 17-Brosch%C3%BCre.FinnegansListe.pdf

http://www.seua.org/finnegans-list/?jury-member=adrian-grima&list-year=2017

The European Society of Authors – created in the spring of 2008 – is a network open to all authors, publishers, translators, readers and cultural actors who wish to participate in the creation of an intellectual community in a multilingual and multicultural Europe.

Placing translation at the heart of our projects and thoughts, we favor an approach that takes on differences in terms of sharing and dialogue. Since October 2011, the European Society of Authors has proposed an annual list of under-translated or forgotten works called Finnegan’s List – the personal choices of a committee of 10 eminent authors from different countries.

Each writer selects three titles that make up the committee’s “elective affinities”. With this project, the European Society of Authors strives to revive a literary canon encompassing all languages spoken and written in Europe and beyond.

Each author briefly explains the reasons for their choice of books. Excerpts of these texts can be found in this brochure but we also invite you to visit our website, http://www.seua.org, to discover all of them and to find out more about Finnegan’s List and our other projects.

Our 2017 List is a special issue devoted to the Mediterranean world. The jury members are all known for their affinities with and expertise on the Mediterranean region.

For this edition, in addition to fiction, we were particularly seeking out non-fiction works and works in other genres and formats that bear witness in some way to the richness and diversity of the Mediterranean world.

If you wish to participate, to contribute or to support our projects, please write us at: contact@seua.org.

ADRIAN GRIMA RECOMMENDED

Lejn ix-Xemx is a fast-paced Romantic historical novel that was written in 1940, months before the untimely death of its author, Ġużè Bonnici, and published posthumously. It has received very little critical attention and even the Maltese original is now out of print. An adventure novel set in the Mediterranean Sea, it defies geographical and ethnic borders and comes across as a particularly topical story in a 21st century world of walls and passport controls. The protagonist’s home is on his corsair galley, the Nostra Señora, and his crew, hailing from different parts of the Mediterranean, is the community to which he belongs. This novel hasn’t been translated.

Barefoot in the Saltpans is a carefully constructed book of strong emotions. Its rather unassuming name is accompanied by an intriguing, almost provocative subtitle: ‘Poetry Mediterranean’. Daniel Massa, a leading voice in Maltese post-Independence poetry, clearly wants us to engage with this apparently elliptic epithet. These are not poems about, from, or even of the Mediterranean. The poet wants to identify them with the Mediterranean, as if his poetry and the Mediterranean were one and the same thing. This collection, with poems written over a span of 50 years, takes the reader into Massa’s alternative “republic” of the Mediterranean Sea and coast. Unlike much of Maltese literature, which stands in awe of the sea and observes it strictly from a distance, Daniel Massa’s poetry is often written from within the sea. Jim Crace describes it in his foreword as “wind-blown, salty, sun-kissed and unambiguously Mediterranean.” The rhythms are seductive and the free unpredictable internal rhymes always semantically significant. Massa revisits his key images in various poems and slowly builds an unmistakable and irresistible visual tempo. Some of the poems were written originally in English while others are English versions of poems written originally in Maltese.

BIOGRAPHY

Adrian Grima (born in 1968) is a prizewinning author of poetry and short stories from Malta. He teaches literature in the Department of Maltese at the University of Malta. He has written and edited a number of academic works, and delivered and published papers in many countries, focusing mainly on literature in the Mediterranean. Several collections of his poetry have been translated, including The Tragedy of the Elephant (2005) and Deciphered Lips (2013). His most recent publication is a third solo collection of poems in Maltese. Grima is also one of the founders of the cultural NGO Inzijamed and its Malta Mediterranean Literature Festival, established in 2006. His work has met with acclaim and received several prizes.