Dialect Poetry of Southern Italy (Italian Poetry in Translation Book 2)

presuming to be doing philological work, he

transposes the local idiom onto the grid of a

rigorous morphological-syntactical

patterning. One should also underline the

exacting transcription criteria, according to a

method that tends to reconcile phonetic and

etymological principles.

As for the contents of his poetry, we can

say that Vittorio Clemente’s work on the

whole has nothing outwardly artificial or

gloomily pessimistic, because it centers, as

Pasolini himself noted, on “the very poetic

Abruzzi of his childhood,” relived not with

sudden flights of fancy, but with a sort of

lucid “fade-out, a reasoned regression.”

Hence the predominance of that “clear

and serene and full vision of nature and

time” that, in our view, is not only the

dominant note in the poem “Acqua de

magge,” but in part of all of Clemente’s