The politics of cross-cultural dependence in language and poetry

Abstract

I assure you I did not wander in here by accident thinking this was a class taking Arabic. I have been reading two stanzas from the middle section of the earliest poem in Maltese-- Caxaro's "Cantilena" dated middle of the 15th Century, but discovered only recently by Dr. Godfrey Wettinger and M. Fsadni (1966). It is the allegorical lament of the master-builder whose magnificent edifice, a long time abuilding, has collapsed. In some ways the "Cantilena" could be read as the allegory of Malta, for long the epicentre of periodic shifts the Mediterranean, with its language, literature and now shifting this way, and now that.