Malta through the eyes of a French diplomat

‘Malta }anina’

and the poor, whom he described as miserable, at least in their appearance. In those days Malta was famed for the Knights’ chivalric glories – a heritage that we still exploit – by known travellers including cavaliers, priests and pilgrims as well as poets and romantic dreamers. In the 18th and 19th century the list also started to feature military and naval officers as well as diplomats, the latter often bewitched by the island’s chequered past, as happened with French consul Miège who in the 1840s published a well researched history of the archipelago.

Daniel Rondeau, France’s ambassador to Malta between 2008 and 2011 – an author by profession – is the latest diplomat to put his impressions of Malta and its inhabitants in a book, first published in French with a title in Maltese that was probably bestowed upon the island ages ago by our North African neighbours. Toni Aquilina, an academic and professional translator specialising in bringing into Maltese French literary classics, did more than justice to Malta Ħanina; one could say that he rendered Rondeau’s performance even more “generous” in a style that could well ennoble Maltese literature.

Following his impressive official tenure on the island, novelist Daniel Rondeau chronicled his keen observations in 200 pages of dulcet narration embracing such romantic reminiscences as orange blossoms in the French Ħaż-Żebbuġ residence, Malta’s clear skies and Mediterranean golden rays of sunshine falling on low white habitats regularly surrounded by lucid azure water. But the writer does not stop here: his journalistic analytical insights combine with his pleasant personality in interlacing a series of images featuring the people of the island, with whom he readily became enamoured.

Outstanding personages such as Abulafia, Grandmasters de la Sengle, La Valette, Wignacourt and de Rohan as well as vibrant characters such as Caravaggio, Preti, Favray, Vassalli, Count de Beaujolais, Byron and Bonaparte are among the historical dramatis personae that the author encounters through several rendezvous with contemporary personalities of different hues. He narrates the beginnings of the French naval school in Valletta’s harbour in one chapter only to share the apprehensions of Libyans from Misurata during their Arab Spring of 2011 in the other. Through well-construed literary paragraphs sculptured in the Maltese golden stone, Rondeau feels at home wherever he goes, be it in Għar Lapsi, Gozo and the Cottonera cities. The book introduces the reader to an array of people coming from all walks of life namely birdwatchers, fishermen and boxers, refugees in boats, performers and minstrels from Israel and Palestine, freedom fighters from struggling democracies and dedicated people giving a good service to humanity besides politicians, businessmen, singers and actors, musicians, writers and journalists.

Ħaż-Żebbuġ never saw so much of Champagne, the author’s region of residence in France, not only through the glittering glasses of the celebratory drink but also through the flavour of so many French distinguished visitors, intellectuals, politicians and entrepreneurs, discovering the wealth of such a tiny spec on the map. Occasionally the book takes the reader aside to introduce opinions on so many subjects, such as Braudel who is quoted as saying, after visiting the island in 1972 that the Mediterranean has always belonged to Malta; it is a little bit of Africa and is in Europe. It is in the East and it is in the West.

Readers of this book will discover that Malta Ħanina is not just a guide book to the curiosities of the Maltese archipelago – one can also meet the author in one of his most intimate moods. Reviewers of the French original in Le Figaro Magazine, Le Point and Libération interviewed Rondeau the man, the believer, the philosopher, the journalist in all the shades an author can gather after writing a good list of publications, including narrative tableaux of Carthage, Istanbul, Tangier and Alexandria. Together with the love of his life, Noëlle, who shared his Malta experience, Daniel Rondeau entwines his paragraphs into a tapestry of flowing verse, artistically and idiomatically translated into this Maltese version with the same gusto as the original.

As every author and translator knows bringing a tour de force from one language into another is not easy; the challenge is overwhelming as it is not only an acute exercise of literary finesse but an idiomatic vivid communication expressing the inner feelings of an author on tour.

Toni Aquilina deserves a congratulatory compliment for achieving a translation of this calibre; reading the Maltese version not only enables the reader to meet Rondeau with the same verve as in the original French, it allows him/her to wallow in a piece of literature that enhances the original.