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

nature, in the pagan or mystical sense

(Pasolini wrote in Passione e ideologia,

Garzanti), but I would add more markedly

Christian and Catholic than in other parts of

Italy, if one only considers that the first

practitioners of Sardinian dialect poetry are

often clergymen. No doubt, that religiosity

at times concealed much more: a sentiment

of revolt and at any rate of not belonging to

the different species that had crossed the sea

to reach the Sardinian shores and then

further on inland, where the sense of the

small fatherland lost has always been

stronger and more alive.

Since then, that headless muse with

scattered limbs has been searching for her

lost head and her tortured limbs precisely in

poetry, always so revealing of the human

spirit, of one’s true, conscious or unconscious

identity, with a doggedness that has become