The Arabic edition of Prof. Norbert Bugeja’s poems has just been published by leading Arab publishing house Éditions Arabesques. Titled ‘Ensa Anaha Layssat Houna’ (Forget that She’s not Here), the collection of seventy poems has appeared in Sheen, Éditions Arabesques’ cutting-edge poetry series. The poetry volume is curated by foremost Tunisian poet Moëz Majed, who has also co-translated the collection together with renowned translator Jamel Jlassi. The book comes with a prologue by cultural journalist and poet Emna Louzyr.

The poems selected for this volume are sourced from Bugeja’s collections ‘Insa li Mhijiex Hawn' (Klabb Kotba Maltin, 2021), ‘Nartiċi’ (Klabb Kotba Maltin, 2016) as well as a few selected poems from ‘Bliet — Poeżiji’ (Edizzjonijiet Emma Delezio, 2009). The collaborative translation is based on the French manuscript of the poems, translated from the Maltese by Irene Mangion, and published in France earlier this year by leading independent publisher Les Presses du Rèel in its Al Dante series. The book cover design features a detail from a painting by renowned Tunisian contemporary artist Zied Lasram.

In many of the poems represented in ‘Ensa Anaha Layssat Houna’, poetry returns as a language retrieved 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.

The translation of the manuscript for the Arabic edition of Prof. Bugeja’s poems was made possible thanks to a translation grant by the Malta Book Fund (National Book Council — Malta).

Prof. Norbert Bugeja is a member of the Department of English and Director of the Mediterranean Institute.