James Vella, L-Imwiet Ħajjin ta’ Krzysztof Zajac

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• published: 22 Aug 2015
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Traduzzjoni ta' John Bonello. Qari ta' Annabelle Galea. Parti mill-workshop ta' traduzzjoni letterarja tal-Festival Mediterranju tal-Letteratura ta' Malta 2015 organizzat minn Inizjamed. James Vella writes: I wrote this piece - "The Living Deaths of Krzysztof Zajac" - while I was deeply entrenched in a much longer story. The longer story (something about Maltese immigrant musicians in 19th Century Louisiana, incidentally) ultimately came to nothing, an unpublished idea still sitting on the shelf. But one afternoon working on it, stuck for an ending, I took a long walk to clear my head. I imagined myself as a wartime fugitive in the woods, a life forever pursued but deeply in love. I got home with a new story idea that came out almost completely in one sitting. Krzysztof was eventually published in my short story collection Devourings (2014, Wounded Wolf Press). More than a year later, the Maltese author John Bonello sent me a translation of the piece. It was the first time I had seen my own written work in the Maltese language. Despite being only second-generation Maltese, my knowledge of the language is sadly much too shallow for literary and poetical uses. I could never have translated (or written) true expressive fiction in Maltese. John's translation was my first window into that, and I was utterly entranced by it. Another friend - a Maltese actress named Annabelle Galea, who currently lives in my hometown, Brighton - recorded this spoken take on John Bonello's translation, giving further Maltese-language voice to a short story I imagined whilst playing soldiers in the woods in the English countryside.