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

movement to reappropriate a dialect which

is more and more local, provincial (but at

times even diversified from town to town,

from farm to farm), in sharp contradiction

with those who instead maintain the

necessity, which everybody is supposed to

perceive, of a linguistic koinè and a single,

true, great language for everyone. The

history of Sardinian dialect poetry in this

century stands really as proof of this

proliferation of dialects, each with its own

“voice,” with its own spelling, unfortunately

never codified, with its own original

phonetics, and its own peculiar

characteristics. And from the start it would

have been absurd to conceive the great song,

between epic and elegiac, between gnomic

and näif of the poet from Barbagia Antioco

Casula being written, let’s say, in Sassarese.

Already the title of one of his books (Boghes