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

popular (at times populist) climate and

sensibility, the thematic specificity (love,

destiny, tragedy, death) characteristic of

Lorca, not to mention the lexical loans and

even certain marked linguistic calques often

found in many past and present Sardinian

poets. The only great difference is that, in

contrast with Lorca’s poetry, that feeds on

great literary and cultural references,

Sardinian dialect poetry is almost exclusively

a kind of poetry that finds all its strength in

being the immediate and direct expression

of popular sentiment. They are, in short, two

types of poetry differently popular, not at

the ideological, but at the artistic level.

Indeed, the great wordplay of some of

the major exponents of Sardinian dialectality

(Lobina, Mastino, Ruju and others) consists

in accentuating the friction between Italian

and dialect, between cultured language and