MaltaMedia.com

Maltese and multilingual poet Antoine Cassar, an active member of Inizjamed and author of Mużajk, an exploration in multilingual verse (Edizzjoni Skarta, 2009), this week received some welcome news: one of his poems has been awarded the Grand Prize of the United Planet Writing Contest 2009.

United Planet is an international non-profit volunteering organisation based in Boston, USA, which carries out social and educational development projects in five continents. The reward for the prize will be a two-week paid trip to a rural village in eastern Tanzania, to teach English and computer skills in a local primary school and to assist in community work.

The winning composition, Merħba, a poem of hospitality, is a narrative, musical homage to the unfailing and unconditional hospitality and warmth that welcome travellers the world over, despite the tragedies and hardships lived by families
and communities on a daily basis. It is at once a celebration and a lamentation of our colourful, shrinking planet and of our common yet conflicting humanity.

The work is part of a new poetic exploration combining Maltese verse with a wider variety of tongues, as a means to continue stretching beyond personal expression and to welcome and reconcile a plurality of close and distant voices. Whereas polyglot poets of the past, such as Ezra Pound and Haroldo de Campos, would often pepper their verse with foreign phrases and symbols merely as exotic ingredients or as a display of erudition, the diverse languages weaved into the Merħba poem are not intended for decoration, but as a living presence of the peoples that speak them.

Merħba, a poem of hospitality was premièred last April at the Istituto Italiano di Cultura in Brussels, together with Miriam Galea and Loranne Vella, and was performed last July, in an English adaptation, to a full house at the Poesiefestival Berlin. On Saturday 3rd October, Cassar will recite the original version of the poem, for the first time in Malta, at Dar l-Ewropa (Triq San Pawl), the European Commission Representation Office in Valletta, in an evening of poetry and music to mark the European Day of Languages during the Notte Bianca - Lejl Imdawwal.

Cassar will be joined by Polyfonías, a renowned musical trio spearheaded by Danish poet Peter Wessel, accompanied by Mark Solborg (Argentina) on the keyboard and guitar, and Salvador Vidal (Spain) on the clarinet. Polyfonías is an innovative project of music and poetry which interwines the four languages in which Wessel was brought up (Danish, English, French and Spanish) not merely to make order out of an external, Babelian ‘chaos’, but to transmit, at times with genuine hypnotism, a deep inner peace. The Polyfonías trio has performed in festivals across Europe, and last year was awarded with the 2008culturas prize, organized by the Spanish Ministry of Culture to mark the European Year for Intercultural Dialogue, for the poem Un idioma sin fronteras (which you can listen at http://www.myspace.com/polyfonias).

For more information on Antoine Cassar’s poetry, or to read and listen to a selection of poems from his latest book Mużajk, an exploration in multilingual verse (Skarta, 2008), visit http://muzajk.info.