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

ACHILLE CURCIO

Achille Curcio was born in Borgia

(Catanzaro) in 1930. A very active poet in

dialect, he has published several collections

of poems. He lives in Catanzaro, where he

taught in a prison for juveniles.

From Lampari (1971), through Hiumara

(1974), until Visioni del Sud (1976), Curcio

constructs his language and his system of

poetics with an eye to the changes taking

place and the modernization necessitated by

social changes, attempting to bring them

into a “grammatical,” prosodic and

rhetorical matrix, capable of signifying the

lyric content, heartfelt, at times even softly

nostalgic, crepuscolari, though ranging over

themes typical of Calabrian dialect poetry:

town life, family bonds, love for the land,