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

The practice of vernacular dialectality,

then, when not instrumentally pursued for

folkloric, sociological or broadly political

use, tended to be connected more with

“nature” than with “culture” in the popular

vein. It frequently relied on the allegorical

fable or parable, the invective, satire, the

song of love or protest, sketches and news

stories, descriptivism and gnomic

sententiousness, the blasphemous wisecrack

and the epigrammatic wordplay, almost

always in keeping with a markedly ethnic

and broadly conservative lore, which

contributed to underline its differences with

respect to elitist Italian literature.

On the more strictly middle-class side,

instead, it carried out a sort of philological

reconstruction of lexicon and grammar. And

when it could count on a tradition in some

ways already “illustrious” (Latium,