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

themselves of an enlightening, preface by

the author, where he evokes moments and

motivations of that period, in which a solid

groundwork was laid for the renewal of

poetry in Sicilian.

It was 1943, the year of Sicily’s

“liberation,” when, Messina writes, “ a few

dialect poets began to meet almost daily in

order to compare their human and artistic

experiences, which until that moment

(namely from Fascism to the war) had been

impossible.^1

Harking back to the lines by

Quasimodo’s “And how could we ever sing

\ with the foreigner’s foot upon our

heart...?”, Messina observes that “foreigner

or not, the foot upon the heart, in Sicily, was

felt more heavily after 1860, when the ideals

of the Risorgimento (...) were betrayed and

in a language that descended from the same