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

mythical tones and hues, so much so that

Raffaele Nigro has said that if Buttitta could

be illustrated by Guttuso, Battaglia can be

illustrated by Bruno Caruso.^36

Nino De Vita (1950), from Marsala, has

been working for several years on a long

“novel” in Sicilian verse, of which he has

published the first “chapters”: ‘U rui

novèmbri r’u sessantarui [The Two of

November ‘62] (1989) and Binirittèdra

(Benedettina, 1991); a poet with a searching

eye, he “narrates,” with measured lyricism,

places and figures of his childhood and

adolescence, pausing on minute details and

great existential dramas (Benedettina is a

fifteen-year-old girl who dies during an

abortion) of the micro-universe of the

Stagnone area, with a detachment one might

attribute to a biologist or entomologist;