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

locutions, forms and lexicon of the purest

dialectality, in short translating from his

dialect without betraying it, the way it

almost always happens in real translations.

Can one then speak of a language for these

Sardinian poets? Or must one speak of what

Contini would have defined a minor

language? Does it make sense to speak of a

language when there is no linguistic koinè

valid for the whole island and this

presumed, fancied language is yet to be

invented and structured and, in short,

artificially recreated? A problem we leave to

linguists. We can only remark that our own

félibristes express themselves in an infinite

variety of dialects, at times contiguous, at

times very remote, not to mention that in

Sardinia there is a group of poets who

gravitate in the area of Alghero and write in

a variety of true Catalan and who are