Fairy Godmother

In this interview with Adrian Grima for BabelMed, Maria Grech Ganado describes her 'passionate relationship' with Immanuel Mifsud:

Immanuel and I taught in the same College on the same floor for a least 3 years before we started to talk to each other. He’s got this pout and sometimes looks surly and when I smiled at him, as I do with everybody, he never smiled back. I didn’t know his name but I fell in love with his poetry. When I discovered that Mr Surly wrote ‘Poezija lil Clara’ I pounced on him when I next saw him, taught him how to smile, made him, laugh, went around telling everyone what a great writer he was. It was HE who first told me I had asked him why he never smiled when I found myself alone in the same lift some months before. We started a passionate relationship – not sexual or erotic – we were two lonely writers in love with our art who were stimulating each other also by virtue of the differences in our ages, backgrounds, and genders. We fought a lot, but I think he thinks of me as his fairy-godmother because I believed in his work with such intensity that I promoted it as hard as I could – both in Malta and abroad. I’ve translated much of his work, both poetry and prose, and there is such a bond of trust between us now, that the translating is as natural as breathing. He corrects my Maltese spelling and occasional grammar mistake, and helps in the production of my Maltese books. He is also the subject of much of my Maltese poetry. So I think I can safely say the lift was going up, is still going up, because of the interaction.

BabelMed - Malta

Maria Grech Ganado Reviews

Immanuel Mifsud prose translated by Grech Ganado