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

contemporary reality and open to

completely renewed forms and contents. No

longer solely the dialect of the vignette and

the farce, the caricature and the idyll, the

sonnet and the maxim, but a dialect that

comes to grips with social and political

themes, for example, endowing them with

new referents and new meanings; or a

dialect that expresses the inner world of the

poet, projecting his feelings onto a backdrop

of solitude and anguish, everyday

ingredients of the civilization of the

machine. What takes place, in short, is a

closing of the gap between the exigency of

the real event, or rather of the realism of

dialect poetry, and the exigency of aesthetic

representation, based on a well-defined and

mature expressive capacity.

One can maintain that Apulia has also

achieved these results, freeing dialect from