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

popular language, playing ironically,

sarcastically at times, on the grotesque and

parodistic effects stemming from a use we

might call “macaronic” of Italian itself or

from the sense of estrangement that comes

from the contact with dialect’s diversity, as if

it they were two non-communicating

galaxies or monads. It must be said that

Sardinian dialect writers have not opted for

this linguistic choice out of literary

saturation, as Montale would have said

(Sulla poesia, Mondadori); if anything, in

Sardinia the opposite has always been true.

Our dialect writers are direct descendants of

their maternal dialect, for the most part not

even inventors of an idiolect of their own,

that is, of their own language, specific,

personal, outside the rules of natural

linguistic orthodoxy, the way it has

happened elsewhere, as in the great