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

real and surreal, as in Circannu Asturfu (1986)

and Pilariu (1988), but also phantasmagoric

popular revivals, as in U Fistinu (1986); all in

a poetic language which has absorbed the

fervid humors of Twentieth-Century

European poetry, expressed in a personal

way in quatrains of classical perfection.

Giuseppe Giovanni Battaglia (1951) from

Alimusa, is tied to the vein of social poetry,

with poems that display the dryness of

Montale’s cuttlefish bones, in a totalizing

dialect. in La terra vascia [The Lowland]

(1969), La piccola valle di Alì [The Small

Valley of Alì] (1972), L’ordine di viaggio

[Travel Order] (1988), Battaglia is with Calì ─

but very different from him ─ the last

representative of the line marked by

Mercadante, but with the peculiarity of a

driller of words. Moreover, his realism has