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

onslaught of the media, because they have

never looked to those speakers as their

readers.

More and more the audience of poetry,

in an era of planetary circulation of culture,

tends to be defined, in fact, by new

categories, not bound by regional or national

specificities, to the extent that the thematics

itself is affected, as it is increasingly forced to

identify universal values in the particulars.

Dialect becomes a “precious,” “refined”

instrument because it is a purer refuge for

the poetic word absolutely longing for

essentiality.^10

In such a way, the languages “of nature”

offer themselves to arduous “philology,”

developed on a textuality traditionally very

alien to them, and represent themselves

tendentially as rediscovered languages “of

culture,” flexible enough to become the