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

Molisan poetry in this volume), from the

particular socio-economic and demographic

context, enduring in its “rural” integrity

until the Sixties and Seventies, when there

takes place a rather hybrid process of

“standardization” (due above all to the mass

media), in which human and cultural

models in striking conflict will be able to

coexist in an unsettling mixture; the

tendency to avoid the risk of aberrant

calques and contaminations seems to

characterize the activity of the “nuovissimi,”

whose production is distinguished by their

philological rigor and their preference for

archaisms.

Meanwhile it must be noted that in

Rimanelli (as at any rate in other

“nuovissimi,” like Giuseppe Jovine: cf. Lu

pavone, Campobasso, 1983; La sdrenga, 1989)

the choice of dialect as a means of expression