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

reappropriation of the peculiar dignity of

the instrument in poetry’s effort to translate

into expression. For this reason he reaches

the conviction of the potential equal dignity

of all languages. It is not so much for

communicative reasons, in fact, that Maffia

offers us the poems of A vite i tutte i jurne

[Everyday Life] and U Ddìje poverille [The

Poor God] in a double form. Independently

from their order in the printed edition, they

are not dialect texts with Italian translation

(or viceversa), but rather two functional

modalities adopted to express the same

poetic stimulus by someone who possesses

two souls beating in unison, equally

sensitive to poetry’s reasons: an

anthropological one grounded in dialect

which constitutes the basic identity of the

subject, and a more restless one, having gone

through an acculturation process for