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

climate of the time, there still remains his

commitment with regards to the project of

autonomy for the region, at least two

decades old (cf. the general Introduction), an

autonomy to be based first of all on a

homogenous, compact and identifiable

linguistic-cultural tradition. This legitimizes

Cirese’s work during these years,

independently of purely aesthetic and

historiographic values, including the

collection Rugiade (1932). L. Biscardi rightly

notes that: “With respect to Suspire e

risatelle, the essential novelty of Rugiade is

marked by the rejection of most of the

“passionate songs,” which in the first corpus

expressed the extreme tension of melic

abandon, replaced by didactic, fable-

centered, gnomic compositions, on the

whole “ideological.” The lines placed as

premise to this last section of the collection