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

and retroactive compensation for the loss of

the original culture, religiously and

humanistically elevated, however, to a

“lament” for lost worlds. In the general

framework of the author’s poetics and

thematics it is possible, moreover, to

establish an internal link between the

defensive function of the culture of the small

homeland and exaltation of the “ethnic”

values contained in the most significant

collection of English poems, Gente mia and

other poems (1978).

From this it can be inferred that for

Tusiani saving a language means saving the

memory of a community, in addition to his

own psychological and artistic integrity, as a

man who does not reject any of his previous

acquisitions, or apparently antithetical to a

more prestigious linguistic and expressive

standard. The image that emerges is that of a