On Saturday 10 June, Prof. Norbert Bugeja signed copies of his book ‘Oublie qu’elle n’est pas là’ and spoke to poetry lovers and book-stand visitors at the 40th edition of the Marché de la Poésie, one of the most prestigious gatherings of publishers and poets in Europe, held each year at Place Saint-Sulpice in central Paris. The event followed on from the formal launch of the book at an event hosted by the Embassy of Malta in Paris on Friday 9 June, under the aegis of H.E. Carmelo Inguanez, Ambassador of Malta to France.
Published by leading publisher Les Presses du Réel in its Editions Al Dante collection, Prof. Bugeja’s volume is translated by Irene Mangion and edited by distinguished editor Laurent Cauwet, both of whom delivered an address and readings on the occasion together with an address by Ambassador Inguanez.
In ‘Oublie qu’elle n’est pas là’, poetry returns as a language stolen from the erosion of memory: Bugeja rummages in sequences of rhythm, metaphor, image and synaesthesia to capture the mood of years that never took place, and ones that may never be lived. What emerges is an elegy built from the surviving marks of a complex female persona. Bugeja engages with this voice by letting speak for themselves those places she lived in or passed through, in the Mediterranean and beyond, within her own life as much as in the author’s reveries.
Over a long quest for a distinct poetic style, Bugeja creates a sequence of moments in which forgetting, as much as remembrance, becomes a condition for surviving among the ruins of an interrupted bond — in a sequence of poems that invite their reader on an alluring journey across anxious spaces of memory.
The publication of ‘Oublie qu’elle n’est pas là’ marks an exciting moment in the internationalisation of Malta’s contemporary poetry. The book is available from the online portals of all major international and French bookstores and at the Les Presses du Réel online portal.
Norbert Bugeja is Associate Professor within the Department of English and Director of the Mediterranean Institute.
