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

sticky crepuscular tone and reach high and

lofty notes, bringing “into history Belli’s

ahistorical world,” as Franco Brevini writes.

This happens because the poet, while in a

certain sense withdrawing into the type of

anti-Risorgimento invectives with which

Carducci had attacked false and deceitful

trophies, does not let himself go, does not

yield to anticlerical invectives or political

parroting with trite formulas or worn-out

archetypes. There is an interview with Ugo

Ojetti that clarifies Pascarella’s poetic

attitude and gives us the key to his writing:

“The spoken language of the Roman people

is not a dialect in the sense the popular

languages of Milan, Venice or Naples are

called dialects. It is the selfsame Italian

language pronounced differently. And add

to these purely phonetic differences the

great superiority of our dialectal language