‘Il-Holma ta’ Geronzju’ is the title of a Maltese rendering of Blessed John Henry Newman’s renowned poem The Dream of Gerontius written by the most famous English religious writer and thinker of the twentieth century.

Consisting of the prayer of a dying man, and angelic and demonic responses, most literary encyclopaedias would state that Newman said that the poem “was written by accident – and it was published by accident.” He wrote it up in fair copy from fifty-two scraps of paper between 17 January and 7 February 1865 and published it in May and June of the same year, in two parts in the Jesuit periodical The Month.

The poem inspired a choral work of the same name by Edward Elgar in 1900. Gozitan, Fr. Geoffrey G. Attard, who is keen on translating short poetic works of a religious and historical nature translated Newman’s long poem into Maltese in 2011 and tried to be as faithful as possible to the rhyme and rhythm of the original work.

Another translation into the Maltese language by Fr. Geoffrey G. Attard, is ‘Qtil fil-Katidral.’ T. S. Eliot’s famous verse drama ‘Murder in the Cathedral.’ T. S. Eliot portrays the assassination of Archbishop Thomas Becket in Canterbury Cathedral in 1170, first performed in 1935.

Eliot drew heavily on the writing of Edward Grim, a clerk who was an eyewitness to the event. Gaither Stewart in a famous article published in 2008 wrote that “the play, dealing with an individual’s opposition to authority, was written at the time of rising Fascism in Central Europe, and can be taken as a protest to individuals in affected countries to oppose the Nazi regime’s subversion of the ideals of the Christian Church.”

“Remaining as faithful as possible to Eliot’s original text, the translation into Maltese cannot be considered a work of poetry but rather belongs to the realm of poetic prose,” Fr. Attard said.

Both works are published in booklet form and can be obtained from the Lumen Christi Bookshop of Fortunato Mizzi Street and the Radju Maria bookshop of Charity Street, both in Victoria, Gozo or the Emmaus Bookshop (C.A.K.) of Birkirkara, Malta.

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