Professor Oliver Friggieri is the author of 11 books on Dun Karm, including his biography, and has spent 35 years collecting – for the first time ever – all the poet’s lyrics in both Maltese and Italian. His volume entitled Dun Karm – la Cultura Italiana a Malta, the full text of his MA thesis in Italian, was launched by well-known publisher Olschki of Florence. He has published numerous scholarly articles on Dun Karm in various international academic journals, mainly in Europe and America. 

 

A symbol of national identity

With which party did Dun Karm (1871-1961) side in the early 1920s? Was he pro-British or pro-Italian? What did he mean in the 1930s when he affirmed that he loved both Italy (for its art) and Britain (for its democratic tradition), but none so much as he did love Malta, his “only mother”? Dun Karm Psaila, soon known as simply “Dun Karm”, is one of the very few people who have managed to mould the Maltese people’s way of thinking. He did it mostly after his death, since many generations have appreciated his vision of the country and numerous politicians have adopted a phraseology that is typically and unwittingly his.

This is perhaps more applicable today, when the apparent simplicity of his verse has grown into a sort of expression of what the complexity of contemporary life makes people yearn for. But major politicians such as Dom Mintoff, Eddie Fenech Adami and Guido de Marco have consistently shown traces of his influence on themselves through their choice of phrases, adjectivisation and emotional intensity of a patriotic nature. Mintoff’s refrain “Malta l-ewwel u qabel kollox” (Malta first and foremost) is typical of Dun Karm. So is Fenech Adami’s insistence on the idea of ‘ahwa Maltin’ (Maltese brothers and sisters) and ‘flimkien’ (together), and of Joseph Muscat’s choice of the key-phrase ‘Malta taghna lkoll’. This point merits a study on its own. Even the revival of the (Latin) word ‘gens’ is due to the poet.

 

The political dimension

Is there anything in Malta that is not immediately political and partisan? All our utterances, in both Maltese and English, are politically loaded and evoke colours. They all imply allegiance, a sense of belonging to a party. Perhaps it is a ‘genetic’ condition: you are born within a party, preceding personal decisions. 

Even if unconsciously, Dun Karm was political. His writings are indications of a situation that tended to go to extremes. The fact that he wrote extensively in Italian implied that he inherently had Nationalist tendencies. When he began expressing himself in Maltese in 1912, he immediately qualified himself to be considered a supporter of Strickland and Boffa. He risked all this, he was afraid of all this, yet he took the plunge. His choice in favour of Maltese, a Semitic language, also warranted the accusation of his being ‘anti-Catholic’, since it implied the abandonment of Italian, an offshoot of Latin, the tongue of Rome, the centre of Catholicism.

It may all sound absurd nowadays, but it seemed very logical in the early decades of the 20th century. In actual fact, Dun Karm continued to write in Italian for much longer after his “discovery” of Maltese in 1912. He was then only reluctant to continue publishing in Italian, due to partisan considerations, but not to write. In the long process of collecting all his scattered poems in Italian, I was most surprised to know how natural it was for him to write in Italian as well as in Maltese. Was he a Nationalist or a Stricklandist or a Boffist? He must have been partly all of them and none.

 

The National Anthem

Dun Karm is best known as the author of Malta’s National Anthem. His six lines have gained weight and significance as they have become older, although they were only composed early in the second decade of the 20th century. Like other works of art, and mainly like forms of collective expression, they have become more meaningful through their growing connotation.

Although the Maltese National Anthem is not as old as those of other countries (the British and the Italian ones, for example), it is fortunately now sufficiently old to bear an international comparison. Anthems acquire greater importance as their historical relevance becomes deeper and their content and form somehow start to belong to previous traditions. Normally they stand for what is constant, namely much stronger than whatever is transient and merely fashionable.

This anthem, accompanying Malta as it reached higher degrees of statehood – independence, the declaration of Malta as a republic, Freedom Day, membership of the EU – has long withstood the test of time. Its fine tune by Robert Samut is no less valuable. I have sought to illustrate all this in my booklet Analizi tal-Versi tal-Innu Malti, published by Zebbug local council.  

 

Dun Karm’s contribution to Maltese literature

One cannot understand any historical and cultural aspect of Malta other than through a comparative approach, so I embarked on the task of establishing Dun Karm’s far-reaching ties with our previous literary tradition, which was Italian. I have dealt with this matter in my books La cultura Italiana a Malta – Dun Karm (Florence, 1978) and Storia della letteratura Maltese (Milazzo, 1986), apart from numerous articles in Italian, English and Maltese. 

In constructing the literary history of Malta, apart from other things, I had to have at hand all the poems Dun Karm wrote over a very long period of time (approximately 1889-1954). And so I started to collect his poetry in both Maltese and Italian, a task which took me not less than 35 years, and which hopefully came to a close in 2007 when Malta University Press published the complete collection of his Italian poems under a descriptive title, Le poesie Italiane. The volume includes poems which go back to much more than one hundred years ago and which are being published in this volume for the very first time. In Le poesie Italiane I have included poems which are as early as 1889 and as late as 1946, and are all put in chronological order together with their original source, namely a manuscript, a typescript, a published copy from a magazine or newspaper, or just a leaflet. Dun Karm was not very keen to publish his poems, either in Italian or in Maltese.

The complete collection of his Maltese poems was published in an edition by Klabb Kotba Maltin and Karmen Mikallef Buhagiar in 1980. That was the first time a complete collection appeared. I had been working on the collection for a number of years. However, in carrying out further research on other topics, I came across more poems by Dun Karm in Maltese, and Klabb Kotba Maltin kindly included them as an addendum to an enlarged edition of my biography of the poet (Dun Karm – Il-Bniedem fil-Poeta, 1980). Paul Mizzi, the grand man of Maltese culture and founder of Klabb Kotba Maltin, is the special one to whom all merit is due for the publication of Dun Karm – Il-Poeziji Migbura.

I came across more poems as well later on (including some minor ones in English). Thus I now hope to have finally completed the task of reconstructing the real literary image of our national poet. Over the years I have also grown to know the personality of an artist who, however strongly and confidently he portrayed his image of Malta, was an essentially timid, inward-looking man, as his major work, Il-Jien u lilhinn Minnu, (The I and Beyond It) amply illustrates in both theme and style.

In my critical studies on his poetic personality, I sought to establish the nature and extent of the influence exerted on him by a rich Italian literary tradition to which he was continuously and most satisfyingly exposed. At the very least this ranged from Dante and Petrarch right down to Monti, Foscolo, Manzoni, Pascoli and Carducci. He retained the modes typical of the previous literary eras as much as he discreetly appreciated those of his own times. A whole interpretation of the life of a country goes in the understanding and the evaluation of what may be termed as the rhythm of a country.

I have dealt with this point not simply in respect of Dun Karm but also, and more importantly, in respect of the pace Malta has adopted at least since the first phase of the post-war period, when Dom Mintoff, Archbishop Michael Gonzi and George Borg Olivier fiercely crossed swords and took up their place on the stage where, in front of a bitterly divided national audience, the die was cast for the future of numerous generations. Dun Karm had yearned for the independence of Malta for many decades, but he died three years before 1964.

 

A non-partisan political commitment

Dun Karm was very much afraid of being identified with any political party. His literary stand, however, somehow constituted a political statement. This he resented in categorical terms. Relying on my memory, I vaguely recall what he once wrote to his friend Laurent Rapa, the eminent Gozitan poet who never forgot his origins and who first acknowledged Dun Karm as a “national poet”. Dun Karm declared that he did not side with Fortunato Mizzi when he previously wrote in Italian (namely between 1889 and 1946, and later, since some of the more recent poems are, to my knowledge, undated), nor did he side with Gerald Strickland when he then started to write in Maltese (from 1912 onwards, and at least up to the post-war period, according to the dated works).

He claimed to have been proud never to have belonged to any political party. Then, I think, he wrote something like this: “Io sono Maltese, solo Maltese, e niente altro che Maltese” (“I am Maltese, only Maltese and nothing but Maltese”). This was not enough for him to be considered as such, but I am sure this is what he was. His works strongly lead to this conclusion.

So the influence he exerted on the literary activity of his times is perhaps only a part of the spiritual legacy he left. When comparing his Italian poems with his Maltese ones, apart from being struck by the sheer elegance with which he handles both languages, one can detect evolution in terms of style and attitude. His basic vision of life, both human and national, is simply one and the same. He embodied correctness in every respect, and was always aware of being a priest. Of course, I never met him, but through the many long years I have dedicated to the comparative appreciation of his works in Italian and Maltese, I think I know him sufficiently – even in terms of his innermost self, which goes much further than the function and implications of a “national poet”.

There is no doubt that he enjoyed the deep esteem of not only his contemporaries but also of successive generations. But I think this is obvious. It is difficult to conclude whether he was a Labourite (the Anglo-Maltese connection) or a Nationalist (the pro-Italian choice). I have studied him thoroughly in this respect, and am still unable to reach a plausible conclusion. It is his ambiguity that makes him what he is.

 

The existential question

Every writer is subject to the double law of time and place: we all belong to a specific point in time and to a particular stretch of land – and no more than that. Life is change, movement, et cetera, and so is the relevance of works of art, and not simply of books. It means that every author is faced with the challenge of being perceived differently by subsequent generations. Of course, the question is put only in regard to eminent writers, since oblivion normally covers the rest. So this is a condition characterising the fact that although, as John Keats put it, “A thing of beauty is a joy forever”, the perception of beauty does change considerably. Fashion is an overriding factor, and frequently it similarly involves the concept of truth as well. A case in point is found in our own paradoxical era, post-modernism.

Although Dun Karm is basically known as a poet of nationhood, his deeper self is quite different. In the 1930s, the culminating period of his whole literary journey, he translated Ugo Foscolo’s major work I Sepolcri (L-Oqbra, 1936) and he thus risked coming closer to the fundamental dilemma of his world view, which I think concerns the problem of happiness with regard to the problem of suffering. Dun Karm is eminently a poet resembling man as a voyager in search of significance and justification. He generally depends on his mother for an answer, and eventually concludes that, in terms of faith, the answer is only acquired through silence, namely confident submission.

Hence I would say, with hindsight, that departing from the discovery of Italian and proceeding with the relatively late discovery of Maltese (he was past his 40th year when he began experimenting with his native language), he finally discovered the uniqueness of silence, presumably the only perfect language, distinctly faithful to self-expression. Of course, in this he is most loyal to the philosopher he considers to be the most important, St Augustine. Perhaps his whole poetic journey is best summed up in something St Augustine said to this effect: “I will keep silent, lest the Lord passes along and I fail to hear him.”

In this respect, Dun Karm is a national poet of a much more relevant dimension. He is looking for a patria that is not restricted by the confines of specific time and place. His major work, Il-Jien u lilhinn Minnu, comes to a halt as soon as his hypothetical traveller discovers that life is meant to be transcended and that the final stage of any verbal or intellectual utterance is only reached through silence: a stage beyond verbality reached through the discovery of something more eloquent than speech. I think that (1938) was his culminating point, and his later works, in both Italian and Maltese, are expressions of a true poet now tending to listen more to the voice coming from within. He died in 1961, but he had completed his final poetic statements much earlier.    

 

A selection of books on Dun Karm by Oliver Friggieri: La cultura Italiana a Malta – Dun Karm (Florence, 1978); Storia della letteratura Maltese (Milazzo, 1986; on Dun Karm: pp. 181-273); Dun Karm – Il-Jien u lil hinn Minnu (Malta, 1988), Dun Karm (Malta, 1989), Analizi tal-Versi tal-Innu Malti (Malta, 2009).

 

Dun Karm’s complete poetical works are published in these two volumes: Dun Karm – Il-Poeziji Migbura (ed. O. Friggieri, 1980); Dun Karm – Le poesie Italiane (ed. O. Friggieri, 2007).