Tiffany Troy

“My heart has spoken thus ____________”:

A Conversation with Abigail Ardelle Zammit about Leaves Borrowed from Human Flesh (Etruscan Press, 2025). 

The speaker of Abigail Ardelle Zammit’s remarkable poetry collection Leaves Borrowed from Human Flesh looks at female figures represented in Greco-Roman mythology and visual art ranging from the tomb of a Roman woman from the first half of 300 A.D., to Jo Ann Callis’s “Woman with Black Line” (1977), a process that destabilizes the relationship between self, text and other, while resisting traditionally phallocentric views of representation. The persona of the entombed Roman woman, for instance, speaks with the incantation: “Let no man visit me in the afterlife” because “[i]f life has dealt me its scorpion blade, / only death can leave me light.” Inspired by Callis’s work,  Zammit imagines the “rattlebag of spite” of the naked female torso, face down on a pillow, and a vertical line drawn from her scalp to her spine. She challenges and extends the form and thematic preoccupations of Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Maltese current events through her erasures. The female body (and its consumption) takes on political dimensions, which is why in the last section of this collection, the line blurs between Daphne the Naiad nymph, and Daphne Caruana Galizia, the Maltese activist. It is in this blurring, in the silence and white space which echo the previous erasures in the #wearedaphne sequence, that the reader can feel the valiance of: “My heart has spoken thus: _______________.”

Tiffany Troy: How does the opening prose poem about Zareb the elephant set up the expectation for the poems that are to follow?

Abigail Ardelle Zammit: Thanks for starting with this pivotal question Tiffany.  The third person version of this proem’s last line, ‘our ears flapping gravely to the beat of human voices’, was in fact the working title of the manuscript.  Eventually it became the subtitle of the first section because it acts like a prologue, allowing the reader to glimpse how I attempt to use language in order to be visited by Otherness, whether animate, or inanimate: an elephant, a tree, a stone, a human being that’s far removed from my present reality.  Perhaps this wish stems from a tiredness with the narcissism and insularity of the self, even an exasperation with the most contemporary forms of first person confessional modes of writing. 

What appears on the page cannot ever wholly escape the circumstances of the writer’s personal identity, just as the English language, being human-bound and historically-compromised, can never truly speak from the voice of alterity.  Having said so, however, for many years I’ve been trying to experiment with a poetic language which instead of representing otherness, allows itself to be visited by whatever lies outside it.  This is in line with feminist poetics where there is an attempt to destabilize the relationship between self, text and other, and to resist traditionally phallocentric views of representation.  Within this kind of poetics, the body’s consciousness becomes the locus for pushing language to its limits;  its most extreme realization would ultimately be a lapse into silence and blankness, which is why this kind of formal and linguistic play is always and forever an incomplete process. 

In this prose poem, the shift from objective perception to a more humble opening of the self whereby the speakers are transformed into Zareb the elephant, ‘a mass of stone tethered to [their] bellies’, is also an acknowledgment that poetry is an exercise in compassion - an incomplete but essential attempt to understand what we are not.  Perhaps, more than ever before, we need poetry to dissolve the very boundaries of selfhood, to make them permeable, to allow the other in.

TT: Who are some influences—literary and otherwise—in the process of putting together this collection, whether within or without the feminists poets writing in the English language?

I believe that there are a few core ideas, often occurring relatively early in life, that shape our creativity for many years to come, which is why I never fail to mention Roland Barthes’ Writing Degree Zero and its controversial take on ‘poetic writing’.  Though I don’t wholly embrace his assertions, the idea that literature, like phosphorus, shines at its brightest ‘at the moment when it attempts to die’—when it is reluctant to subjugate nature to language, when it delights in ambiguity and conflicting voices, when it revels in fragmentation, when it plays with stunning collocations whereby sound dictates meaning, if at all— well, this represents an infinite spectrum of possibilities, and the type of writing I admire and aspire to is always reaching towards silence—that place where it hovers like a kite, right before it snaps free of its string.

 For those who have read Leaves Borrowed from Human Flesh, my indebtedness to Ovid’s Metamorphoses is obvious – transformation is intrinsic to both its form and thematic preoccupations, which is why that moment of the kite ripping into colour is replete with extraordinary tension,  a tension that at times necessitates a quasi-contradictory kind of grounding...  Feminist poetics, eco-poetics, postcolonial theory, as well as poetry that isn’t ashamed of political engagement—all this has informed my writing, from Hélène Cixous, to Luce Irigaray, Deryn Rees-Jones, Caroyn Forché, Jo Shapcott and Jorie Graham.

There are so many writers I admire, much fewer that I love, and when it comes to whole collections, I draw sustenance from poems whose rhythms express my way of being in my own body and in the world—what I think of as the subtle choreography of sound and pause which makes you write the way you do.  If I must be honest, this has less to do with the contemporary collections I read, and much more to do with the poetry I repeat and analyse daily, in communication with my students  while we’re engaging in literary criticism, or when practising metre—Akhmatova, Auden, Blake, Brontë, G. Brooks, Bishop, DH Lawrence, Frost, Hardy, H.D., Heaney, Merwin, Morrison, Neruda, Ní Chuillenanáin, Poe, Plath, Rilke, Rossetti,  E. Thomas, to name a few.  And to use a Brontëan metaphor, these poems have ‘gone through and through me, like wine through water’, in ways that might not be immediately obvious to the reader, perhaps because we are on the look out for theme and identity politics, but less in touch with the ear and the body’s consciousness. 

TT: Speaking of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, in what way is the figure of “Daphne” centered in “#wearedaphne” within the Maltese context in the foils of Daphne the nymph and Daphne Caruana Galizia? How do you portray it through a disruption of the lyric form through different types of erasure?

For me, Daphne has always been one of the most memorable Ovidian heroines,  a symbol of female resistance through painful transformation.  When I starting re-reading The Metamorphoses, it was merely to take pleasure in revisiting tales from my childhood; only after a striking encounter with contemporary erasure did I decide to probe the text in order to test whether it would shed light on a story that I’d been struggling to tell for a couple of years.  It was the name of the journalist that compelled me to start with Book I,  ‘The Transformation of Daphne’.  As I’ve recounted in some detail in a conversation with Kristina Marie Darling featured in the Tupelo Quarterly (Nov 14, 2021),[1] and later in an interview with Professor Lucia Boldrini  (Sing in Me, Muse series 2022-2023, Goldsmiths Centre for Comparative Literature & Goldsmiths Writers’ Centre),[2] the words came forth with a power and clarity that unsettled me.  All I had to do was select the text which unearthed the brutal story of the investigative journalist’s assassination: the terrible blast, the fire that tore her out of herself, her scattered body, her still-triumphant voice. 

How would Ovid have known?  How could I ever have guessed that a male voice from antiquity —a writer banished to the far reaches of the Roman empire, a man whose tongue, like Daphne’s, could irk and offend, or perhaps tell uncomfortable truths—would lend me the vocabulary for a contemporary Maltese assassination of devastating proportions?  Yet the Latin poet knew a lot about the violence inherent in every silencing act.  He understood how power is wielded and abused, which is why his Apollo is lusty, insatiable, grabbing anything that captures his fancy, adopting the lexis of love whenever he practises rape and assault.  And so, to my horror, the assassination was laid bare, over and over, in the rest of the tales that became part of #wearedaphne.  The residue was blacked out, in a gesture that made the text resemble the newspapers headlines from the 16th of October 2017.  Because blackout has often been used as a form of resistance, it is a reminder that whatever is muted, will keep clamouring to be heard.  Blackout is also a satirical attack on 17 Black, the name of the secret offshore account owned by the businessman who now stands accused of commissioning the murder.  

Having done with Mary M. Innes’ prose translations, I moved on to the poetry translations by Allen Mendelbaum, which led to #stillwearedaphne, this time exploring the events from a different angle, relinquishing blackout for the simple lifting of words into poetic form.  There is a conspicuous tonal shift and a return to the lyric, perhaps an act of faith in the spirit that survives in other forms—through protest, through civil society, through the refusal to forget.  Even now, and especially now, after eight years, when her memorial in Valletta is being torn down on a regular basis, and justice has not yet prevailed…  

TT: Leaves Borrowed from Human Flesh utilizes texts in translation, and both the blackout and lifting of texts feel like a type of translation. You are an accomplished translator and a translations editor of Tupelo Press. What is the act of literary translation to you and how does it prefigure in the collection?

I love your question Tiffany, because what it suggests is that every translated text is also a found text, bringing together the keen critical faculties of a literary analyst, and the creative consciousness of the writer.  Translation is perhaps the most radical act of reading, which is why literary translators approximate within themselves an ideal reader, capable of absorbing and orchestrating the text in its semantic plurality and sensual multiplicity, yet fully cognisant of their limitations. 

For poetry and lyrical prose, in particular, the act of literary translation is also an exercise in deep listening.  The source text must be read out loud over a relatively long period of time in order for its soundscape, rhythms and syntactical idiosyncracies to enter you, body and soul.  For this reason, the most rewarding aspect of translation for me is inventing a new music in the target language.  There is a wide spectrum for variation within this newly-cast score, ranging from close metrical approximation, for instance, to a more radical departure from the source, particularly if you are dealing with languages whose etymological roots are widely contrasting, like English and Maltese. 

As a reader of translations, I am especially sensitive to their music, the way the creator-translator has attempted not merely to draw out the semantics and thematic richness, but how she has  re-imagined and re-created a score that fits the phonetics, tempo and rhythm of the new language, one that is fully autonomous, yet capable of forging a bridge between the source and that new resplendent creation.   

When, like myself, you have inhabited two languages for as far back as you can remember —especially, perhaps, when you haven’t acquired English (in my case) as a second language but as a first language together with your mother tongue (despite what  many native English speakers mistakenly assume)—you become keenly aware, not merely of the tensile limits and capacities of each language, but of the difficulties inherent in translating complex socio-cultural and socio-political realities.  My particular post-colonial positioning as a Maltese person has dispelled any naivety about linguistic power politics: every ekphrastic poem, every erasure, every reference to Maltese politics and events is circumscribed by language and by my own particular reading of that situation at a specific point in time.  To your question about how literary translation prefigures in the collection, I would therefore say that it is everywhere, because it is a creative consciousness that for better or worse, has had to come to terms with the incompleteness and transitoriness  of translation, and that keeps learning, every day, how to partake of its ephemeral beauty.

TT: What are you working on now?

My research into desert landscapes across different continents is still on-going.  It would be rather premature to speak in any detail at this point in time, but it will probably be high on the experimental, hybridity, genre-bending spectrum in terms of form.  

TT: Do you have any closing thoughts for your readers of the world?

I feel that this is a very challenging time in human history, and a very precarious one at that— politically, culturally, ecologically.  Perhaps what the planet requires of us is  to look outside ourselves, to engage intellectually and creatively, to read the text of the world with candour and nuance.  To resist and to re-imagine.  To be ourselves, transformed. 

[1]  #wearedaphne: A Conversation with Abigail Ardelle Zammit, curated by Kristina Marie Darling - Tupelo Quarterly

[2]  #wearedaphne – Retelling the Assassination of Malta’s Foremost Investigative Journalist through Ovid’s Metamorphoses – Centre for Comparative Literature