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

part, with a few variants, of the volume

L’odore della poesia, issued by the same

publisher.

This collection has remained one of the

most revealing of the excitement running

through Sicilian dialect poetry in those

years. The poet’s main themes of civil

commitment and sentimental autobiography

are further developed in Cremona’s

subsequent poetry in Italian, as he

abandoned the vernacular muse after that

first successful experiment.

G. Spagnoletti has noted how those two

veins of Cremona’s poetry “entwine in the

dialect texts in a two-colored braid1” and

how, for example, the melic idly rises in

verses of crystalline purity, whereas “in the

Italian poetry it is constrained by an

instinctive rejection of what is too easy,

already known.”2