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

“cardinal” and “illustrious,” the less they are

tied to the slangy forms of everyday

communication.

In this way, an awareness of the

undertaking becomes an essential vehicle of

sublimation for a lexicon that can even be

reduced to its archaic forms, as it can be

legitimately reinvented, through an effort of

responsible personalization capable of

exploiting the natural ductility of poetic

languages which have never been

constrained by the standardized signification

typical of the languages of communication.

Pasolini was substantially on the mark

when he spoke, crowning a long reflection

on dialect, of an “earlier, infinitely purer”

language.^8 A definition that, if it can appear

today in some ways beholding to a certain

romantic and decadent postulate, charged

with the sense of added responsibility