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

very personal and painful journey into the

depths of his spirit, which identifies

completely with his land of Ceglie, named

after the ancient Messapian people; while

still a part of Salento it is, with its Samnitic

tones, a linguistic island. With this dialect

Gatti has built his expressive world,

instinctively opposing this bitter and stony

South, its toil and beauty, to the inexorable

advancing of industrial society.

Nevertheless, rather than turning it into a

reactionary and obscurantist motif, falling

into the incontaminated-reality trap, the

author has tried to keep alive the alternative

reason for such a peremptory reality: namely

to give voice, through a descent to hell, to

the unconscious, the unutterable, the

unpredictable, to forms still unformed. Far

from indulging in nostalgia or cult of the

past, Gatti’s poetry proposes to signify,