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

personal recreation of language for purely

expressionistic purposes, instrumental only

for the primacy of artistic expression. They

address every theme by striving to render

through essentiality what standard language

should now achieve in extension or through

artifice, and, in the effort toward semantic

connotation or phonic realization, they often

tend toward the reinvention of languages

now frequently half-buried in the

consciousness of the speakers under the

constrains of levelling contaminations.

Southern dialects tend to become, as a

consequence, true languages of art, shedding

all of the dross of folklore and overcoming

the obstacles of slanginess. It is almost a

recovery of behaviors that, from the

Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century above

all, had provided fodder for literature tout

court (I am thinking, for instance, of the