The Essential Achille Mizzi, selected, translated, and introduced by Peter Serracino Inglott : a case for performative translation

Abstract

Delivered on the occasion of the English publication of Achille Mizzi's essential poetry in Maltese, this paper discusses the issue of the translatability of literary works. One of its key arguments concerns the translated poem as an aesthetic orientation neither capriciously free of the original, nor yet restricted to a repeatable meaning. The paper argues that the literary translator, in this case Peter Serracino Inglott, must work at the associative and inferential level, careful not to replicate the identical devices of the original text in a new poetic context where they might be rendered ineffective, but equally careful to project the connotative reach and aesthetic potential inhering in the original work. One consequence of this creative engagement with the original text is the mutual growth of translator and translated work: the translator must submit to the artistically unfolding world of the original text, but also revives its progressive insight with intuitive contributions that maintain its connotative direction. The translator finds his ordinary self previously translated, as it were, by the poetic universe he inhabits, submitting his sensibility to the very archetypal flow and figurative trends that he now extends.