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

SARDINIA

The Sardinian dialect muse sang for a

long time in the catacombs before being

heard. The religious linguistic references are

not at all casual; on the contrary, they are

intended to underscore, right from the start,

the origin and strictly religious nature of the

first literary manifestations in the island,

subjected, as is well known, to recurrent

foreign dominations for two thousand years,

a considerable time span. Therefore, the

image of a muse with her head cut off,

mutilated almost up to our own days, seems

to me at once the one that best represents

the condition of Sardinian dialect poetry,

precisely as being headless, unable to find

itself, know itself, and, in brief, to exist

outside of its servile condition of forced

obeisance toward “external” cultures, that