The year 2021 is the 150th anniversary of Dun Karm and the 60th anniversary of his death. And for this special year, the Malta University Publishing has just issued a book to honour this poet who is Malta’s National Poet.
Charles Briffa's Bl-Għasluġ
tal-Ħsieb: Dun Karm, La jixjieħ u la Jmut,
The book’s author, convinced that the literary present gains depth by absorbing the literary past, helps readers to understand more why Dun Karm (1871-1961) is still cogent and valued today.
Dun Karm wrote numerous poems that deal with subjectivity within a Christian conscience, and he wrote others that contain a social commitment to promote the national identity and dignity of the Maltese people during colonial times.
Historically considered, the poet-priest remains the most important figure in Maltese literature for he emphasised the significance of the inner self. His poetry of the maturing inner self is located in his Catholic thinking. With the growth of the inner self, landscape grew too, for landscape often conspired with thematic implications for the enhancement of the inner self. Thus landscape became more visible in Dun Karm and had a sort of therapeutic spiritualism. It was from landscape that he very often entered the self. Then as the self grew inward, landscape retreated to the background.
The immense burden Dun Karm had to carry is dual: the subject of some of his poems is his own subjectivity, and the subject of some others is collectivism. In the former the poet sees spiritual life in himself, and in the latter he interprets nationalistic feelings (encased in Malta’s National Anthem). In his poetry that promoted the national spirit of the Maltese there was continuity with the previous generations of Romantic poetry rife in the 19th century, and in his poetry of the maturing inner self there was an anticipation of the needs of the new poetry rife in post-Independence Malta.
Bl-Għasluġ tal-Ħsieb contains a fresh translation of Dun Karm’s masterpiece Il-Jien u Lil Hinn Minnu (1938; The Self and What Lies Beyond It), a poem of 520 hendecasyllabic lines depicting the journey of the human soul from intellectual pride to utter Christian humility. This translation was presented and discussed in London on 13th October 2015, in a seminar on Maltese literature in translation that was organised for the official launching of Charles Briffa’s This Fair Land, by Francis Boutle Publishers together with the National Book Council of Malta.
Stylistically and thematically Il-Jien u Lil Hinn Minnu is the representative Maltese poem of the 20th century. It contains a profundity of schematised philosophical insight and a disciplined intellectual creativity. Its ambition is to teach the essence of Christian living and to explain what makes humanity so hard to endure.
A spiritual reviewer, Dun Karm seeks not to quarrel with reason but only to show how inadequate it is in matters of faith. William Blake (1757-1827), an English poet of the Romantic Age, believed that the imagination was the real man; for Dun Karm, a poet’s imagination was the real Christian man. His imaginative vision reverently elevated poetry to philosophical and theological levels. To write about soul-stirring matters was in line with the historical period in question. The first half of the 20th century was full of wars, political disputes, and industrial uncertainty. In the face of such situations, the privilege accorded by Dun Karm to poetry is considerably more than mere escapism. He made poetry appear an enclave of Maltese society that celebrated the creative values and affirmed morality.
Imaginative creation became a nonalienated task in which the transcendental scope of the priestly poet’s mind provided some criticism of ideologies enslaved to facts. If society appeared fragmented, poetry appeared organically coherent. In Dun Karm’s hands creativity became associated with spontaneity and rationality, and poetry (far from being identified with idle escapism) assumed the deep social and philosophical implications of an idealogy. One can even say that poetic imagination gained so much power that it almost became a social force, transforming the people’s mentality in the name of Catholic values.
Bl-Għasluġ tal-Ħsieb shows that there is in Dun Karm continuity, never conflict, between his poetic and social commitments.
Professor Charles Briffa lectured on translation and Maltese literature at the University of Malta, and since 1983 he has been involved in regularly broadcasting literary and linguistic programmes on the radio and on television. His numerous publications include a wide range of studies on language, translation, and literature, and he has gained several literary awards. On 13th December 2020 the State formally invested him as a member of the National Order of Merit for his dedicated contribution and achievement in the field of the Maltese language.
