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

convents. He contributed to numerous

reviews and was a point of reference for the

new poets. He died in Palermo December 6,

1946.

He is to be considered one of the greatest

Sicilian poets of this century. His work is a

blend of social issues and religious

sentiment. He was an authentic spokesman

for the “voices of the feud”: alongside the

sorrowful voice of the farmers, there is that

of the derelicts of the surfara (sulfur mine),

in which the characters of a new Dantean

hell are damned when still alive: a “carnàla,”

“not of the dead but of the living,”^1 a

“carcaruni” [large oven] that, at night,

“smokes dejectedly,” while “over the

mountain / the starlit sky widens, / the

countryside becomes more mournful.”^2

Life in the sulfur mine seems to be