Since presenting his latest book ‘Muzajk’, an exploration in multilingual verse (Edizzjoni Skarta, 2008) at the Leipzig book fair and Berlin Literaturwerkstatt last March with the support of the MCCA, over the past few months, Antoine Cassar was invited to perform his poetry at a number of literary festivals and events across western Europe. On Saturday 3 October, Cassar will join fellow multilingual author Peter Wessel at the EU Representation in Valletta, in a joint musical and poetic performance to celebrate the European Day of Languages, as part of the ‘Notte Bianca – Lejl Imdawwal’.



In mid-May, Cassar was invited to the Københavns 4. Internationale Poesifestival, organised by the Copenhagen Literaturhaus, with the support of the Danish Arts Council. Two of the most popular events were a reading dedicated to love poetry, and a projection of poetry films, in which Mr Cassar showed his two Maltese videopoems Comb, a violent description and lament of last December’s bombardment of the people of Gaza, and L-Ajkla, on April’s earthquake in the Abruzzo region.

Mr Cassar’s main event at the Copenhagen festival was a ground-breaking reading dedicated to “translingual poetry”. In 2004, three European poets, unbeknown to one another, embarked upon three seemingly similar yet essentially different individual projects of multilingual verse. Five years and a number of awards later, these same poets – Peter Wessel (Denmark/Spain), Øyvind Rimbereid (Norway), and Antoine Cassar himself – were brought together in a common reading in Copenhagen, and were to meet again two months later in Berlin.

Whereas Mr Cassar’s muzajki or mosaics flit between the tongue-in-cheek, the cynical and even the violent, Rimbereid’s multi-tongued poetry bridges existentialism with science-fiction, and Peter Wessel’s Polyfonías loosely yet seamlessly weave together the four languages in which he was brought up (Danish, English, French and Spanish) not merely to make order out of an external chaos, but to transmit, at times with genuine hypnotism, a profound inner peace.

A few weeks after Copenhagen, Mr Cassar took part in Onzè, the 11th edition of the Mediterranean poetry festival of Palma de Mallorca, organised by local author and cultural activist Biel Mesquida. Among the invited poets were Giuseppe Conte, one of Italy’s most renowned contemporary writers, and the acclaimed Slovenian author Brane Mozetiè, whose poetry has been translated into Maltese by Adrian Grima. Events included readings in local bars, recordings and interviews, and performances at a local penitentiary centre and at the main city theatre. On this occasion, Mr Cassar gave prominence to his poetry in Maltese, choosing to recite Madrid Madrid, a long alliterative poem playing on the consonant group M-D-R (marid, imdardar, irmied…), documenting the four exciting yet difficult years he spent in that city until soon after the March 2004 train bomb attacks in Atocha, where one of those to reach their final destination was his colleague Juan Pablo, with whom he often travelled to work.

In July, with the support of the Malta Council for Culture and the Arts, Mr Cassar teamed up again with Peter Wessel and Øyvind Rimbereid for a second fully multilingual reading at the Poesiefestival Berlin, one of the largest literary events in Europe. In an electric performance to a full house at the Akademie der Künste, aside from the sonnets contained in the book Muzajk, Mr Cassar recited the English adaptation of a work entitled Merhba, a poem of hospitality. This poem is part of a new project weaving Maltese verse with words and expressions in a broader variety of languages – or as was termed almost accidentally by one of the festival organisers, “Multese”, a word which may move a little too much toward the macaronic, but which certainly sounds better than the scientific, too oftenly interchangeable designations as “multilingual”, “translingual”, “polyglot” and others. Originally performed last April at the Istituto Italiano di Cultura in Brussels together with Miriam Galea and Loranne Vella, Merhba is a long narrative poem which celebrates the unfailing and unconditional hospitality and friendliness that welcome travellers the world over, despite the tragedies and conflicts lived by families and communities on a daily basis, and despite the shrinking of our planet at the hands of ruthless global commerce.

The Merhba poem has also been adapted into Italian, and was recently declared a finalist of the literary prize Insieme Nel Mondo 2009.



For more information visit http://muzajk.info

Antoine Cassar would like to express heartfelt thanks to the Malta Council for Culture and the Arts and to the Maltese Embassy in Berlin for their enthusiasm and support.