marcin
(Marcin)
#1
themselves of an enlightening, preface by
the author, where he evokes moments and
motivations of that period, in which a solid
groundwork was laid for the renewal of
poetry in Sicilian.
It was 1943, the year of Sicily’s
“liberation,” when, Messina writes, “ a few
dialect poets began to meet almost daily in
order to compare their human and artistic
experiences, which until that moment
(namely from Fascism to the war) had been
impossible.^1
Harking back to the lines by
Quasimodo’s “And how could we ever sing
\ with the foreigner’s foot upon our
heart...?”, Messina observes that “foreigner
or not, the foot upon the heart, in Sicily, was
felt more heavily after 1860, when the ideals
of the Risorgimento (...) were betrayed and
in a language that descended from the same