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

MICHELE SOVENTE

The poets who employ Latin are

increasingly rarer, even if recent and less

recent tradition is filled with important

names like Pasolini, Vitrioli, Mazza,

Morabito. Some ascribe this loss to the

schools that have slackened the reins (where

are the great Calabrian Latinists who taught

Boccaccio and Petrarch?), others think that

writing in a dead language is obsolete and

anachronistic, but if they were to meditate

on what Pascoli said every time he dealt

with his competitions in Amsterdam (“The

language of poetry is always a dead

language”), perhaps they would understand

the scope of a cultural and poetic operation,

and would not dismiss the phenomenon so

quickly.

On the other hand, there is nothing