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

branch as that of the Sicilians, whose poetic

school had inaugurated our first literary

civilization,”^2 and this was also due to the

conservative political class that ruled the

island.

Messina notes how the problem of the

national language soon became an obsession

for our literature historians, “as if the fate of

the nation depended on a more widespread

linguistic homogeneity,”^3 with the resulting

clear opposition of the official culture to the

dissolving action of dialects; in this climate

the resistance offered to Verga’s writing

becomes clear; Fascism will accentuate what

can be called a “southern question” of

literature, condemning the heresies of

dialect.

When in 1943 that first nucleus of poets

began to gather, the need for a process of