‘Ittri mill-mitħna tiegħi’

Ittri mill-mitħna tiegħi is the translation of a collection of short stories, Lettres de mon moulin, mainly located in Provence by the French novelist Alphonse Daudet (18401897) published in 1869. Soon after the publication of the Lettres, Daudet became the most popolar novelist in France.

Alphonse Daudet in his early 20s, tired of the darkness and noise of Paris, used to spend his summers in his mill in Fontveille, “perched like a big butterfly” on top a hill, “a sort of general headquarters, a centre of strategic operations” of a multitude of rabbits. These immortal tales, which secured his fame, were born (at least theoretically) in this disused mill, under the burning sun in the valley of Rhone. In the distance we can hear Monsieur Seguin’s horn calling his beautiful white goat, Blanchette; in a little wood of evergreen oak trees the sub-prefect falls asleep writing poetry; in the mountains a young shepherd shelters the most beautiful girl he has ever seen who asks him if the stars get married; the parish priest of Cucugnan asks St Peter about the fate of his poor parishioners. This old abandoned mill, for Daudet, becomes the soul and the spirit of Provence in the silence of the Alpilles or in the noise of the drums, the stories charged with emotion, joy and tears, remain fresh for ever.

Maltese readers will quickly come to see echoes of our society in the tales. In The Beaucaire Stagecoach a baker and his dough mixer quarrel about their respective parish saints. In the Camargue the game-keeper and the horse-keeper never talk to each other – “It’s because of our opinions... He is red, and I am white.” Maybe these things together with the Aleppo pines, the cicadas, the blazing sun on the dusty roads… Malta as we used to know it, are what makes the Maltese translation feel so natural.

Throughout his life Daudet never lost his love of Provence and these short stories, which vary in style and format, are written with a certain gentleness, yearning for the place and humorous irony. A few of them are comic faux-folk stories, some of which were filmed by Marcel Pagnol in the 1950s. There are impressive tragedies in less than 2,000 words, like news items in an old newspaper. In one of them, The Arlesienne, the son of a farmer dies because of his obsession for a flirt from Arles in her velvet and lace. Daudet based a melodrama on her (translated into Maltese by Professor Toni Aquilina) with music by Bizet. Others are close to a Dickens Christmas story, but with a bitter edge to their sweetness. Then there are plotless sketches full of the sense of place, and what a sense of place! And above all there is the intensity of his gaze.

Daudet’s style is impetuous and lively (in fact in his lifetime he was criticised for being more of a journalist than a novelist). This polished translation truly succeeds in reproducing the vigorous, almost journalistic style, of the original.