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

keeping with a radical formulation by

Pascoli: “the language of poetry is always a

dead language.”^10

Despite the difficulty of linkage, which

the exponents of literary Sicilian life have

always experienced, with the important

centers of the publishing world,

concentrated mainly in the North, in its

Italian and dialect output the Sicilian

Twenty-Century is rich with noteworthy

personalities of international repute

(Pirandello, Quasimodo, Vittorini,

Lampedusa, Sciascia, Buttitta). Quite often,

the possibility of entering the most exclusive

literary circuits has meant leaving the island.

The cases of Lampedusa, Piccolo, Bufalino,

are exceptional and due to chance. The

submerged, quality literature is considerable,

full of important forgotten names: one has

only to think of narrators such as Raffaele