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

not prompted by patriotic fervor. Chiesa and

Tesio write: “In the attempt to find a

criterion to mark a point of departure for

Twentieth-Century dialect poetry, we have

had to concede that the numbers don’t add

up: there is no date in which chronological

and critical reasons coincide; or at least we

have not seen it. Di Giacomo published

various collections before 1901 (and in fact

he does not appear in Mengaldo’s anthology

to throw off the reckoning); yet anyone

working on dialect poetry cannot—it seems

to us —begin to talk about the Twentieth

Century without Di Giacomo: it would not

be possible to find the origin of the poetic

line that was to bear such fruits in our

century. It is precisely in Di Giacomo’s

experience that one can observe how an

epigon of the Nineteenth Century can

become the first poet in dialect of the