MARIO AZZOPARDI FEATURED IN MEDITERRANEAN

LITERARY PROJECT

Mario Azzopardi’s new, long prose poem The Memory and the Sea, has been selected with nineteen other European works to form part of a Biennale of Prose from the Mediterranean. The venture started when European writers were invited to send works to be included as part of the Odyssey 2003 project, initiated by the Institute of Mediterranean Theatre based in Marseilles (France), directed by M. Richard Martin in association with the Cultural Centre at the University of Corsica.

Every two years, the Institute hires a ship which is used to host “an international parade of artists crusading for peace, justice and human rights,” and which charts a journey from one Mediterranean port to the next. The Odyssey project today consists of no less than 24 countries engaged in an unprecedented human adventure.

In 2003, Mario Azzopardi was asked by Mr Richard Muscat, then chairperson at the Voice of the Mediterranean radio station and presently serving as Ambassador for Malta in Ireland, to create a street carnival to welcome the “ship of art and peace” in Malta. Azzopardi was also invited to produce a literary work on the subject of emigration.

In a style which combines history with fantasy, the piece traces the socio-psychological significance of the mass exodus of Maltese citizens whose social and financial conditions forced them to leave the island during the nineteen fifties/sixties, when emigration was official policy but was seen by the local people as virtual exile.

The Memory and the Sea was then submitted to a French publishing house, Albiana-CCU and eventually selected for inclusion in an anthology, Une Journee de litterature en Mediterranee, celebrating twenty Mediterranean writers from Albania to Portugal,

from Syria to Serbia, from Italy to Israel, from France to Cyprus and Malta. The 260 page anthology of works translated into French is edited by Francois-Xavier Renucci for the “Crossed Literature” series (www.albiana.fr). Mario Azzopardi’s piece was translated by Francis Beretti.

In an introduction to the anthology, Renucci hails the unity and cultural diversity of the twenty Mediterranean authors whose “collective evocations of mythologies, fantasies and deep meditations” pay homage to the respective localities in the Mediterranean region.