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

real Basilicata into a hallucinato¬ry

metaphor of any maternal world, of the

place of origins in which all readers can find

gestures, people, phrases and images of their

own birthplace. With full universal validity

and philosophical thoughtfulness Pierro,

evoking his conversion to a dialect steeped

in archaic Latin, confessed: “it was a

question of recovering an absent language,

since it also belonged to my personal past as

well as to the more remote and ancestral

past of my people.” In the dialect of Tursi he

filters a prayer, the word in which what is

finite is linked to the arcanely infinite. And

in Pierro is at work the lesson of St.

Augustine and Kant. A meditative

personality, Pierro considers dialect the

“language of poetry,” a lyrical instrument,

capable of bringing into the light of

consciousness the concluded and perfect