A decades-long endeavor

Camilleri said that even though this was the first time a Chinese publishing delegation had been present at the Malta Book Festival, literature exchange between the two countries, which established diplomatic relations in 1972, started a number of years ago and has gained momentum in recent years.

The first Chinese book translated into Maltese was Call to Arms, a collection of the most important short stories by luminary writer and scholar Lu Xun (1881-1936). It was published under the title of Is-Sejha in 2003 by the SKS Publishers in Malta. Its translator was Clifford Borg-Marks, who studied Chinese literature at Peking University from 1978 to 1982, and became the Maltese ambassador to China.

"We are so proud to be the first publishing house in Malta to translate Lu Xun into Maltese 21 years ago," Joe Borg, director of SKS Publishers, told the China Daily website.

Borg's company was also the first in the country to publish the Confucian classic The Analects in Maltese as L-Analetti — Konfucju in 2022.

"In 2017, I was invited to visit Jinan to participate in a conference on Confucius. There were The Analects in many languages but unfortunately, there was no Maltese," Borg said.

He invited Sinologist Salvatore Giuffre to take on the translation. Funded by the China Cultural Centre in Malta and the Malta Book Fund, which is organized by Malta's National Book Council, Giuffre spent two years translating the magnum opus directly from classical Chinese into Maltese.

A sensation in the Maltese translation community, the book was acclaimed for filling a gap in research on Confucianism in Malta. "By having Confucius translated into Maltese, we can better understand your greatest philosopher in our language — meaning that his teachings are now part of our literary heritage," Camilleri said.

In 2023, Faraxa Publishing published Gholjet il-Qasab (Wild Reeds Hill), an award-winning novel by Shanghai author Yin Jianling. This made it the first Chinese book for young adults translated into Maltese.

Joanne Micallef, founder and director of Faraxa Publishing, expressed her thanks to the China Cultural Centre in Malta, which facilitated the copyright purchase and translation of Wild Reeds Hill and The Three-Body Problem.

"At the moment, I aim to finish the other two books in the trilogy while looking for other Chinese books that may interest the Maltese," Micallef said, adding that she wanted to introduce Chinese readers to popular children's books in both Maltese and English that her company publishes.