Antoine Cassar
Antoine Cassar is a Maltese poet, translator, and creative activist for universal freedom of movement.
Born in London to Maltese parents in 1978, Cassar grew up between England, Malta and Spain, and worked and studied in Italy, France and Luxembourg. In 2004, after a thirteen-year absence from the Maltese islands, he returned to Qrendi, the village of his family, to re-learn a language he had almost forgotten.
In 2009, Cassar's multilingual composition Merħba, a poem of hospitality was awarded the United Planet Writing Prize. His Maltese poems have been translated into over twenty languages.
Passaport, a long poem printed in the form of an anti-passport for all peoples and all landscapes, has been published in ten languages, with profits donated to grassroots associations supporting refugees in the community. The poem has been adapted for the stage in Malta (awarded Best Production and Best Actress at the 2010 MADC One Act Play Festival), France, Belgium, Italy, and Australia.
Bejn / Between, a selection of 33 Maltese poems with parallel translation in English (by the author, Éire Stuart & Alex Vella Gera), plus the long English poem The Long Rope, was published in 2011 (Ed. Skarta).
Erbgħin Jum (Forty Days), a series of poems about walking as self-therapy, was published by Ede Books in 2017.
As a literary translator, Cassar has rendered a number of his fellow Maltese authors into English and Spanish, and is an avid translator into Maltese of Neruda and Whitman.
Buy
Links
© Antoine Cassar 2018.Copies may be authorised by luxorr (Luxembourg Organisation For Reproduction Rights)
Advertisements
Tag Archives: islands
The shapes of Lesvos
Lesbos, or Lesvos. Shaped, as written by Odysseas Elytis, like a platanus leaf, which “some god, in order to have his fun, severed and blew away in the middle of the ocean”. I see more of a resemblance with a fig … Continue reading
The shape of Lampedusa (reprise)
(Written following a trip to Lampedusa, two years after writing The shape of Lampedusa – part 1) After having visited Lampedusa, I see four new shapes in its map. As suggested by this mural on the side of a children’s … Continue reading
Love at the bottom of the sea
(Re-published from the Passaport Project blog) Ewropa! Intix tisma’ l-imħabba ssejjaħ minn qiegħ il-baħar? Europe! Can you not hear love calling out from the bottom of the sea? Europe ! N’entends-tu donc pas l’appel de l’amour venant du fond de … Continue reading
Christmas Island
Christmas Island, located at 10°30′S 105°40′E, 500 km south of Java in the east Indian Ocean. An Australian territory since 1957. Area 135 km2, population 2,072 (as of 2011). A place where several migrations intersect: Chinese and Malay ‘coolies’ (i.e. migrant … Continue reading
Robben Island
For the past ten days, I haven’t been living where I’m living. I searched for Robben Island on the map, and I’ve been absorbed ever since. Area 5.07 km², pretty much flat, 12 km north-north-west of Cape Town in Table … Continue reading
Poem to the Senkaku/Diaoyutai mole
There’s a photo-tagging war raging around the Senkaku / Diaoyu / Tiaoyutai Islands on Google Earth, and it’s hilarious. Many of the photographs are accompanied by messages more or less well parsed by machine translation, often with exclamation marks in … Continue reading
The shape of Lampedusa
(Notes for a future ‘Atlas‘ poem) The island of Lampedusa has some highly intriguing shapes. A door snail, peeking out of its elongated shell, checking if it’s safe to slide out. The head of a shrew, looking the other way, … Continue reading
