Posts by Albert Gatt

Translation Tuesday: Excerpt from This City of Dolls by Clare Azzopardi

October 7, 2025 | in Translations, Uncategorized | by Albert Gatt

One day the nation will be bereft of dolls

The dolls leave and don’t come back “because life in the city is unbearable.” Who cannot sympathize with their choice? In this week’s Translation Tuesday, we bring you a haunting poem by the Maltese writer Clare Azzopardi, translated into plain, elegiac English by Albert Gatt. In presenting a city mourning the exodus of the dolls, Azzopardi’s poem draws us into the spectacle of objectification, the reduction of living creature to inert, inscribed surface that precedes all mass violence. Here as elsewhere the doll is the perfect image of womanhood under fascism, but what sets Azzopardi’s poem apart is not just its mastery of the elegiac tone, but a gesture, so small it’s almost imperceptible, towards the possibility of communication with fascism’s despised other: “sometimes the protagonist is also I / and sometimes / sometimes / words are.” Read on.

The dolls migrate once a year.

They come out of their houses and walk to the shore.

It’s an auspicious day, the day the dolls migrate.

Little boats await them along the shore.

Twenty dolls take their leave, give or take.

Year after year.

Translation Tuesday: “Gracey” by Clare Azzopardi

June 26, 2018 | in Translations | by Albert Gatt and Clare Azzopardi

One day, Gracey turned up at the shop. Lost. Befuddled. Out of place.

Tuesday means we are back with more translations! This week is a first for us as we travel to Malta with Clare Azzopardi’s story “Gracey”, translated from the Maltese by Albert Gatt. A sense of glumness and class disparity permeate this beautiful story.

Helen always looks glum. She finds it so much easier to look glum. She won’t give anyone that satisfaction. She looks glumly upon the vegetables sold by Fredu who’s parked, on Tuesdays and Thursdays, at the next corner down from where she lives; she looks glumly at the fresh ġbejniet on the counter in Vitorin’s hovel of a shop, before she asks her to wrap four up for her; she looks glumly at the girls wearing pink shoes and the boys whizzing past on bicycles; she looks glumly at the women who put a chair out on their doorstep on summer evenings and while away the time chattering or reciting the rosary; she looks glumly into every shop window in Republic Street and every shop window beneath the arcades; she looks glumly from where she’s sat, surrounded by shoes, at the people walking past in a hurry; she looks glumly at Polly, who’s always scrounging for empty lemonade bottles; she looks glum as she dusts the shoes in the shop, as she counts the cash, as she raises the shutter, as she lowers the shutter; she looks glumly at her own face in the ancient, brown-stained mirror hanging on the wall in the dark, narrow corridor and at her own image in the long mirror inside the wardrobe door. She looks glumly at her mother, aged and doddering, as she sits in an armchair in the balcony with the shutters closed listening to the radio against her ear.