Multitudes Malta.

Planning Application /07229/22. This is my first time abroad alone. This is my first time alone abroad. This is my first time alone abroad on a residency. This is my first time in Malta, alone abroad on a residency. None of my family have been here and the friends who have been speak in general pleasant platitudes. It is in this sense a virginal land for me, untouched by others’ preconceptions, a place ripe for my creativity to juice. Being here alone means that I have no-one to bounce off, no ally from my own culture with whom I can gawk at the scenery. The wonderment and confusion remains internal, splashing in the sea is a brief release. I’m here to attempt to translate, what I see, what I read, the conversations I have. Into a language that I can understand. Rhwbeth fi’n gallu deall. Bilingualism. Maltese. English. Welsh. Manglish. Wenglish. Wemanglish. Chaosish.

I am here on a translation residency, my languages being Welsh and English. As a first language Welsh speaker with the name ‘Esyllt’ living in Glasgow, Scotland, I spend a lot of time translating my identity for others to understand, to close the gap (or open?) between myself and the context within which I find myself. My loose proposal coming here was to translate pieces of text from English into Welsh and vice versa, with an experimental and radical view of translation. But truthfully, rather than translating pieces of specific texts in Welsh and English, I have spent more time trying to translate Valetta into a language that I can understand, into my own conception of truth and beauty, morality and nature through writing, drawing, speech. I have been thinking about bilingualism, how a country sustains two languages and two windows on the world, and how this puts my bilingual identity into relief.

So I soak it all up. I want to see it as a place of neat dualities, dry stone, wet sea, Maltese but English, eclectic but stuck in its ways, traditional architecture but modern abominations, one country but a bilingual culture with two ways of seeing things. Something like my country. And in many ways, this is what I have decided to see. Within the grid system of Valetta, I put a lot of effort into creating a singular vision of this duality - a traditional culture and a colonial culture that are butting up against eachother, or living separate lives in harmony, like lovers in different time zones. But all the tourists from all over blur this clean translation that my brain so desperately wants to reduce the fortifications into. Mae’n fwy na deuoliaeth, mae’n benchwiban melysgybolfa gythreulig hardd a hyll. Y cychod cruise enfawr sy’n tra-arglwyddiaethu dros y baeau, y bobl glên o Montenegro, the angry Germans waiting for their food for 45 minutes at the blue grotto, puce spreading across their cheeks. The English pensioners complaining about queue jumps, and “these people are clearly not British”, a’r dynion Indiaidd sy’n dechre sgwrs gyda fi ar y stryd a finne’n ateb I come from Wales. Is that in Australia? A cherdded i ffwrdd yn sydyn. Nothing like saying you’re from Wales to get a man off your scent.

Many Maltese persons I meet here tell me wildly different things from one another, and sometimes even within the same person, the conversation will fork and twist, opinion and truth becoming conflated and swollen. Go to the Malta Experience, DO NOT go to the Malta Experience, I meet Marica who tells me I must be assertive. Dwi’n dal fy anadl. That she has never had bad experiences with men. That she was harassed on the bus often as a young woman and is still slapping people on the street.

I meet Amanda who says that she once saw a tiger in a squat in the building we are standing in now. In welsh we hear smells. Clywed arogl. Above me at night I hear the scent of burning rubber and smell animal sounds way past when the Bombi stop shooting.

I worry that I am a tourist here. I meet Elizabeth who tells me that feminists are too extreme in this chauvinistic patriarchal culture, where the beautiful balconies were a way for the Arabs to keep her indoors. That the Maltese are obsessed with penises because that’s the only thing they know how to sculpt, and I will find a penis on most roundabouts. She tells me that her husband has a village mentality and that she hates code-switching. Dwi’n dweud wrthi mod i’n ofni mai twrist ydw i yma. Mae’n hurtio. She exclaims NO that I am not, you are here doing research, no no no you’re not a tourist.

But what is a tourist other than someone doing research? Breaking off bits of the world into their own conception, like a child gnawing on a hunk of chocolate. Getting away from your familiar field of knowledge to see it better, seeking external reference to validate your own way of being, your own argument for living. When we experience anything different from ourselves and take it into account, reflect on it, even for a quarter of a pastizz, is that not research? The hawaiian hat I bought with Malta EST. 1967 is a souvenir of a place distinct yet amalgamated in the fantastical splurge of this globalisation.

One of the reasons why doing ‘research’ in Malta is so difficult for me is because half of it is so familiar, which instead of anchoring me, adds to a feeling of distance and confusion. Even though one of the few things I knew about this island before I came here was 150 years of British colonial rule (I google the amount of years as it feels like it could be longer, or much less), part of me is annoyed that Malta is not a clean break from everything, everything I know. And yet if it was I would never have understood about the penises, or the tiger, or the old boatman in his seventies trying to give me his number. English here is easy and available and everywhere, people with accents implying that English is their second language come here because they wish to speak English. It delineates what I believe to be ‘foreign’. When I walk down from the parliament along republic street I hear a teenage girl with a thick scottish accent moan “what kind of Mcdonalds closes at 11pm”, then groups of people drinking with scandinavian, italian, canadian, irish, maltese, welsh accents all speaking together in English. The universal tongue flattening difference, easing small talk, a non-political unifier, both sapping and swelling cultural variety. This global English is not the English I understand to be true. When I start feeling frustrated, I see red. Postboxes, telephone boxes, ‘colonial stores’ in Sliema. Coch oedd fy hoff liw. Bits of Sliema feel like its identity has been chewed up, pulverised from within its own diarrhea.

I swim in the sea most days, stung twice by jellyfish. I swipe my card to get the venom out, I tap my card to pay for spritz. In welsh jellyfish are called, cont-y-môr, blobus, or, as the English like to mock, pysgodyn wibli wobli. Pysgodyn wibli wobli is one of those made up welsh words used specifically by English people to make fun of the language. Emma invites me to a stand-up comedy night at a place called King’s Gate Pub in Msida and there are sheep-shagger jokes, just like Wales. Or the ones made about the Welsh. It’s all in English.

When I sit drawing Valetta from Fort Sant Angelo, Birgu, drying salty skin from the cruiseship sea, I see all her arches and structures more clearly, the mass of windows, angles, colours, lack of colours, stressed trees jutting out above the fortifications and I think: is it easier to draw a place that is familiar or foreign? What language do the walls of Valetta speak? What part of Wales are you from? Oh yes I’ve smelled of that.

The main actual tangible text I have translated whilst I’m here is ‘A Manifesto For Ultratranslation’ by Antena, a call for radical translation that resists making things easy for the dominant language (in my case English). In struggling ymbalfalu am ystyr ac eglurdeb, I have tried to keep the dominant message of the manifesto in mind in my interaction with Malta and her landscape. Not to super-impose, to extract, to take away from, to smoothen for my own benefit and for my own culture her nuanced chaos, her chaosed nuance, but to respect the fact that there is a gap between me and the place, that there always will be a gap, that the gap that the gap but in the gap there is the potential for new understandings, different readings. Tourism that’s healthy, research that’s trashy. Achos does dim math beth ag ystyr llythrennol gair. Would you like tal pepe with that? 

People often speak of language being ‘irreducible’, rendering translation an impossible task. Malta, in its multitudes, cannot offer me a smooth translation sensible sips like a straw in a milkshake. I feel her chaos on my burning skin, the overdevelopment in her jellyfish stings, the slivers of authenticity in the crawl of her spider underneath my pillowcase when I arrive.

Maen nhw’n cyfri mewn saesneg fan hyn hefyd, ynghanol Malteg.

In Rabat, before entering Mdina, yn chwyslyd o’r bws ac angen pisio, dwi’n mynd i fwyty crand yr olwg i ddefnyddio’r tŷ bach ac archebu espresso. I sit out in the afternoon sun looking over one of the best views of my life, fields and green and orange like a thought from early childhood, like what I imagined maybe being an adult would be like. It is a plane of patterns that I draw and I want to cry, mae’n atgoffa fi o adre. An early place.

Tell me what’s Maltese for Maltese? That’s the type of thing I should have learnt by now. Y geiriau dwi wedi dysgu hyd yma: Luzzu, grazzi, ciao, pastizzi, triq, tal pepe, mdina. Ftira. Exat. Wy y. Bombi. Manglish. MemshimNiche. M danone!

In Welsh we have a word. Mela. Sometimes with an ‘n’ added at the end. It means to interfere, disrupt, meddle. Paid â mela gyda hwnna! Mae hi wedi bod yn melan eto. Well iddyn nhw beidio â mela gyda’r llwybrau swyddogol. It is mostly used in west-walian dialect, and I have never ever heard it being used in a positive way, it is disparaging, telling-offy, disdainful. But I’ve always thought it’s sound was joyful, kind, delicious, fizzing. Mela.

Planning Application /07229/22 rejected.

Diolch yn fawr.