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

find a way of putting on a show. Di

Giacomo, however, was also a journalist and

careful student of events, of Neapolitan

history, what one might call an erudite, who

did not miss the particulars of a people and a

culture thirsting for truth, though never

meant to become tyrannical. The journalist,

the man of theater, the erudite, then, do

their inlay work in the “ariette,” in the

sonnets, in the short poems, in which we

find alternating voices, allusions,

suggestions; in which we perceive, in the

background, the lament of a Chimera that

devours men and things to make them new,

perennially new. He hade made his debut

with tales that he defined “Germanic,” to

the extent that he awoke the suspicion of

plagiarism in Cafiero and Verdinois who had

invited him to contribute to the Corriere del

Mattino; they were “fantastic” stories, and if