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THIS WEEK BOOKS maltatoday | SUNDAY • 31 MARCH 2019 4 Dividing her time between Malta and Paris, poet and translator Elizabeth Grech speaks to TEODOR RELJIC about how this crucial sense of living in between two countries informs her debut poetry collection, bejn baħar u baħar Already from the title, we get a sense of the wistful distance and displacement that certainly characterises the poems gathered in this, your debut collection of poetry in Maltese. Did you always strive to have such a cohesive thread running through the work, or was it a case of cherry-picking relevant poems accumulated over long stretches of time? I have been writing in a very sporadic way since I was 18, a couple of years before I went to study in the south of France. I remember writing my first poem on a piece of paper at Hastings Gardens in Valletta, sitting on the forti- fications contemplating the sea. I threw the paper away a few days later – a ca- thartic release fresh off a romantic dis- appointment. Since then, I wrote quite irregularly. I have started writing regu- larly over the past two years, including rewriting texts or verses I had written before and experimenting with new ones. All these words had been bubbling inside me for a long time but I am con- vinced they needed to mature like a rip- en fruit before being expressed. Let's say my voice was looking for its path and is now taking the right track and continu- ously changing along the way. When I realised I had accumulated quite a number of texts, Clare Azzopardi (fel- low writer, and something of a men- tor), encouraged me to create a relevant thread by grouping them according to the themes they addressed. In turn, this helped me have a clearer perception of what I wanted to publish. At least one strand of the collection is concerned with 'existing in between' your native Malta and your adoptive home of Paris. How does this situation inform the emotional space that helps you craft poetry? Well, for the past twenty years, my life has been designed by my comings and goings between Malta and France and I have now spent as much time living in one country and the other. So this "exist- ing in between" certainly leaves a feeling of belonging to neither and at the same time belonging to both, that is reflected in my writings. However, above all, the emotional space you mention has been formed by my interior transformation and growth. This is an inner process, which is, of course, triggered by external experiences, encounters and spaces. Par- is is an enabling environment for all this, and it has opened up an infinite number of doors to different experiences of all senses that have in some way or another seeped into the layers of my poetry. Longing is also a key aspect of many of the poems in this collection. What strives you to articulate this pained but complex set of emotions, and would you also tie it to the idea of dividing your time – and emotional space – to two separate countries? I left my country to settle elsewhere… Teodor Reljic Designed by comings and goings Elizabeth Grech: "Maltese literature lacks female voices". Photo by Zvezdan Reljic