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

can’t easily approach the high literary

dialect forms of cultured individuals.”

It was not a way of withdrawing into a

limited linguistic habitat, but rather of

finding in it the true soul of the people,

which is the same as saying the soul of the

world. No doubt in his “beautiful, strongly

cadenced, limpid verses,” as Alfonso Gatto

defined them, the ciutat mia [my city] is not

only a certain and unique place referent, but

almost an obsessive presence, a ritual

endlessly re/peated but never monotonous,

through minimal and at times almost

imperceptible variations that each time

adjust that central image, almost like the

fading of time, of hours and seasons, which

Sari can always capture with great clarity

and with the poignant tenderness of a

creature for its creator, if not really that of a

child for its parents. Even a certain