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

neoavantguarde, which he has subsequently

left behind, most decidedly in his narrative.

Here Nigro varies and dismantles idioms,

trying his hand at a variegated historical

material. Both the way words are written

down and the use of dialect in Nigro take on

the task of signifying a damaged and almost

indefensible reality, assaulted first by the

ethnocide of emigration and then by

corrosive consumerism. Therefore Nigro’s

dialect is neither memorial nor regressive, it

is not a descent into a protohistorical or

mythical-childlike world, but it is a living

fragment, residual cry, a uniting language in

the struggle for the new development of the

South. In the preface, Leonardo Mancino

defined these poems: “fresh, readable and

passionate letters on the condition and

agony of words.” Protesting against the

overbearance of the languages of mass-