On the second centenary of the birth of Charles Dickens, SKS published the third edition of Karmenu Vassallo’s masterful translation of the Dickens masterpiece.
Vassallo, as he himself tells us in his preface, began the translation on Ash Wednesday, 11 February 1948, and concluded it on 25 September 1950.
As he tells it, he was put up to the translation by the owner of the Giov. Muscat printing press in Merchants Street. Mr Muscat, is-Sur Johnny, suggested he translates Gulliver’s Travels. But Karmenu Vassallo counter-suggested Charles Dickens.
The famous social conscience of Dickens must have appealed to Karmenu Vassallo’s social conscience. Dickens has other novels which show perhaps better his concern about the living conditions of his time but Tale, showing the contrast between industrial revolution London and guillotine revolution Paris must have been more attractive. Besides, this book was many times on the syllabus of schools.
After the first edition, the book was again published, later on, by Bugelli Publications and now SKS have come out with the third edition.
One should not read the book for the original Dickens story but rather for the masterful translation by Karmenu Vassallo. This is Maltese as it should be written: although the book has its own inherent problems since it describes an England which we can hardly envision and a France deep in the throes of revolution, two countries, two languages, two very different situations, there are hardly any foreign terms in the story.
Nor are the sentences a pallid version of the English sentence structure turned into Maltese but real Maltese sentence structures. It is not a hurried mass-produced translation nor, heaven help us!, a translation by Google-translate.
This is real Maltese, written by a master of the Maltese language who had the leisure to translate and turn the concepts as written in the English language to concepts expressed in beautiful Maltese.
In these days of mass produced books or stream of consciousness, it is a pleasure to wander once again in the intricacies of the Dickens novel written in masterful Maltese.