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

examples of Marin in Grado, Loi in

Lombardy, Pierro in Tursi or Pasolini in

Friuli. In the Nineteenth Century in Sardinia

they were still searching for a language, a

linguistic habitat ubi consistere. Later only a

few isolated cases (Salvatore Ruju, Pompeo

Calvia, Cesarino Mastino, Benvenuto Lobina,

Francesco Masala and Ignazio Delogu - in

addition to the even more isolated examples,

if one can call them that, of Sari and Pinna ─

have demonstrated the possibility of

bending dialect to their own personal

expressive need, with a few happy

inventions at the level of verbal forms and of

the still uncodified orthography.

Instead, in Sardinia it happened that a

dialect poet, such as the logudorese

Francesco Masala, has been able to be

dialectal even when he was writing in

Italian, borrowing from the maternal dialect