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

being unmasked: “Yes, I am / and I am not

here / [...] I wait / in my hiding place for a

sign / I hide to be caught.” The hiding place

is the cocoon in which solitude is cultivated.

Outside it, but nowhere else, lives the other

(nature, surroundings, people) to which the

cocoon feel it must open. The inventory of

relics runs through memory’s archive,

becomes symbol of a revised anthropology

and the cause of an existential restlessness

that leads to a vagabond destiny. For this

reason the poet renounces the paper world

of dreams and, along with it, the world

typical of traditional vernacular poetry, in

order to attest his different way of

reclaiming private song in dialect, with the

torment of contemporary life experienced in

the closed space of his nest in contact with

the things he loves, the secret pacts, and

again the books: “I always take along / a