Prof. Norbert Bugeja has given a sequence of readings of his poetry at the prestigious Festival Internacional de PoesÃa de Salta (FIP Salta) in Argentina, to which he was invited as an international guest poet.
He recited his poetry in the Maltese language over three reading sessions, with parallel recitals of his poems in Spanish translation. Prof. Bugeja was invited to the event by festival founder Leopoldo ‘Teuco’ Castilla, widely respected as one of Latin America’s and the world’s greatest living poets, on behalf of the festival commission.
During the Festival, Prof. Bugeja also gave his insights on a writing process that has been taking shape for the last six years, and that has led to his current corpus of poems. He also spoke about the affinities between continental, regional and transmarine manifestations of the poetic, and shared his views on the diverse trends, interests and characteristics of the contemporary literatures of Malta and the Mediterranean.
The Festival featured a line-up of foremost poets writing today on the continent and internationally, from Rolando Kattan to Margarita Laso, Leo Lobos, Renato Sandoval Bacigalupo, José Zuleta Ortiz, Gary Daher and others.
It involved, moreover, poetry readings by many of Argentina’s leading national writers, and its events programme included focused roundtable sessions that discussed eco-poetics as well as the oeuvre of Rafael Felipe Oteriño, a leading Argentinian poet who also read his work at the Festival.
Last year, editions of Prof. Bugeja’s poetry were published in France by leading poetry house Les Presses du Réel in its acclaimed Al Dante collection (in Irene Mangion’s translation), and in Arabic by major publisher Éditions Arabesques — Sheen (the latter in a joint translation by Moëz Majed and Jamel Jlassi supported by the Malta Book Fund).
The Spanish translations of Prof. Bugeja’s poems are by Vanessa Zahra. The parallel recitals of the poems in Maltese and Spanish resonated with the Festival’s numerous audiences, and have generated considerable interest, expanding the international reach of Malta’s poetry in the process.
The Festival was supported, amongst other entities, by the municipality and the Culture Secretariat of Salta, as well as Argentina’s Universidad Nacional and Universidad Catolica de Salta.
Prof. Bugeja is a member of the Department of English within the Faculty of Arts, and Director of the Mediterranean Institute.
