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

nevertheless the spare, quintessential words

of his vocabulary betray a compassion which

is as deep as it is contained, and are able to

lend an epic greatness to small events,

Fatticeddi [Small Events] (1992), of almost

rural simplicity. An epic without the

“marvelous,” unless one considers in this

manner living “day after day,” as

Quasimodo would have said. De Vita’s moon

has no need of hippogryphs to be reached:

children look at it, crouching in a circle in

the garden, and listen to one of their friends

talk about it: about the whiteness, the spots

in the whiteness, the light it gives, the

halfmoon. And the game played by the

moon as it hides among the clouds. Among

them there is also a small blind boy:

And suddenly Martino

stopped me.

“It’s beautiful”