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

from the texts collected in the

aforementioned volume, constitutes a

valuable exemplum of that historical

climate. The engagement, not shouted or

proclaimed, is rather to be found in the

effort to make poetry “a song of the people”

(and not a “popular song”), that is to say,

living lyric expression of a land and its

people, in a new language, capable of

showing how the linguistic instrument

adopted could be bend and molded, in an

upward tension. A kind of poetry in which

one can’t find anything superfluous or any

self-indulgence towards folklore. To be sure,

the zabbàri or Sicilian carts are still there,

but the way of treating them is new, just as

certain views of the landscape never give in

to an oleographic descriptivism, while

pressing are the problems of the self, the

passing of time, the thirst for freedom, the