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

languages, sectorial, technological etc., it is

in the face of this falseness of language that

the poet must seek the best way to be able to

say, once again, what ditta dentro, which

amounts to saying the sentiment that he

shares with other men. Just as one must try

to save with all his strength a haven of

greenness, of a living and real nature,

threatened by the ever increasing flows of

concrete, the same must be done in the

realm of poetic language. Then it is of

precise, maybe civil, moral and religious

significance, even more so than poetic, that a

great number of Twentieth-Century poets,

after a period of limbo, have dived into the

great sea of dialectality, as the place of

authenticity and truth in contrast with the

falseness of life and history that language

was dispensing in the erosion of time, of

modes and forms.