Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/782193
maltatoday, SUNDAY, 5 FEBRUARY 2017 39 This Week ON February 8 at 18:00, Adrian Grima will give a public talk about 'The Oxygen of the Future. A Med- iterraneanist Utopia' as part of the Utopia Anniversary Events Series. This event is open to the general public and is free of charge. The talk is being held in the Faculty of Arts Library (Old Humanities Building) of the main campus of the University of Malta in Tal- Qroqq, Msida, and is organised in collaboration with the Department of Maltese. The talk, which is being held on the 80th anniversary, to the day, of Albert Camus' lecture to inaugurate the new Maison de la Culture in Algiers in 1937, is about utopian narratives of Mediterra- nean unity. The roots of Camus' vision, steeped in 'benign' French colonialism, lie in the ideas of the early 19th century utopian social- ist Claude-Henri Saint-Simon and the writings of Gabriel Audisio, founder of the École d'Alger. This talk also focuses on the ideals of 'Mediterranean synthe- sis' and 'Mediterranean human- ism' that the pied-noir of Gozitan origin, Laurent Ropa, inspired by figures like Audisio and Robert Randau, wrote about passionately in Melita, the paper of the Maltese North African diaspora. Grima asks whether this Mediterrane- anist utopia which inspired Ca- mus' inaugural speech and which Audisio saw as "the oxygen of the future", has anything to say to us today, in an increasing cynical and xenophobic world? Adrian Grima teaches literature and representations of the Medi- terranean in the Department of Maltese at the University of Malta and is a visiting lecturer at In- alco in Paris. His family His great grandfather, who moved to Malta from Corfu in the late 1800s, was the son of an ethnic Maltese Cor- fiot father and a Greek Orthodox mother. Dr Grima has written and edited a number of academic works in Maltese, English and Italian, and has published prize winning collections of poetry and short stories in Maltese for adults and adolescents. He has spoken about the Mediterranean imaginary at conferences in Malta and abroad, including a keynote speech at the University of Ox- ford. The Utopia Anniversary Events Series 2016/17, 'Utopian pasts – utopian futures? 500 years after Thomas More's Utopia (1516)' was launched by the Departments of English, German and Philosophy in the Faculty of Arts, University of Malta, in spring 2016 to com- memorate the 500-year anniver- sary of the publication of Thomas More's Utopia. More's fictional island Utopia, the 'no place' which is also the 'good place', has given its name to diverse visions of better futures and remains a highly influential idea. Today, the concept of utopia evokes different reactions: from associations of totalitarian states, self-enclosed insular worlds and impossible departures from real- ism to welcome or even necessary explorations of alternative futures and ideas of new socio-political orders and potential realities. The Utopia Anniversary Events Series engages with such perspec- tives from a variety of disciplines and approaches, with talks, film screenings and panel debates. It has been extended into 2017 due to the wide range of contribu- tions by members of the Faculty of Arts and the broad interest in the topic within the University and beyond. SOME self-appointed crusaders for the Maltese language might be worrying too much about its fate, at least if linguistics professor Da- vid Crystal is to be believed. In a wide-ranging long-form interview with l-aċċent, Crystal, a world-re- nowned populariser of linguistics and hailing from a bilingual coun- try himself, discusses in detail the oftentimes uneasy relationship be- tween Maltese and its overbearing roommate, English. As one might imagine, Crys- tal isn't overly enthusiastic about code-mixing, a phenomenon pre- sent here in Malta as it is in his na- tive Wales. "Any healthy language can assimilate words from other languages without any trouble, but there can be a point in an en- dangered language where so many words come into the language, when you get code-mixing start- ing, that people can suddenly stop being able to use their own lan- guage." However, somewhat counter- intuitively for those who seek to keep their language as untouched by foreign influences as much as possible, Crystal believes this could backfire in a big way. "Young people [...] need to respect the tra- ditions of the people who speak (relatively) 'pure' Maltese. Con- versely, the people who are 'pure' Maltese speakers and writers need to respect the other group," said Crystal. "If they don't, then that is the be- ginning of a possible decline. It is a very difficult situation, because unfortunately the senior citizens tend to be very pedantic and ag- gressive, very protective, and they do not realise that their attempt to protect is actually harming the language." That said, this doesn't exclude the need for an institution like the Kunsill tal-Malti. Among the roles Crystal mentions such a council could have are the creation of au- thoritative dictionaries and gram- mars of the language in question. "I think that the role of an acad- emy is to give a kind of 'meatiness' to the language, to give it a sanc- tion or an official blessing," Crys- tal says. He also points out that widely-spread languages such as English do not need a council of the sort since the language already has all the resources its users need – apart from the impossibility of establishing one single authority to govern a language which is the official language of more than one country. The interview – published in Maltese – is available on a spe- cial supplement of l-aċċent, a free magazine issued by the Maltese translation department of the Eu- ropean Commission. The publica- tion is made possible through the voluntary work carried out by its contributors, the bulk of which are translators and academics in the field. Aside from this inter- view, this edition addresses vari- ous fields which concern those who are interested in the Maltese language or translation in general. Among these is the use of the in- fix "-ixx-", which is a thorn in the side of those who write regularly in Maltese, a first-person account of life as an interpreter, as well as an overview of the Maltese trans- lations of Shakespeare. The electronic copy of l-aċċent can be found at: http://is.gd/accent World-renowned linguist David Crystal weighs in on the Maltese language In search of a 'Mediterraneanist Utopia' Public talk by poet-lecturer Adrian Grima confronts a landmark lecture by writer-philosopher Albert Camus, this Wednesday David Crystal. Photo by Alan Delia