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

particularly in the famous Lamentu cubbu pi

Rocca Ciravula, becomes heartrending (and

even redeeming) in the Jajita “corpus.”

It should be noted that Calì’s work, with

the exception of the youthful sonnets of

Mongibeddu, in the late Forties, becomes

dense and impetuous between 1966 and

1972, the year of his death. He published, in

an incessant creative fervor: Frati Gilormu

[Fra Gilormo], 1966, divided into 7 mysteries

and final litany for St. Francis, in Sicilian

hendecasyllables, in which are narrated the

simple miracles of the Friar, in a tone

suspended between the apocryphal Gospel

and the Fioretti, with echoes of Di Giovanni;

E un dialu arreri a ogni zappinu [A Devil

Behind Every Pine Tree], 1966, the story of

the woodsman Ciccio Bagongo, of his crazy

wife and of Master Venere who gets 14 years

for stealing some firewood plus two for