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

true), but also a sort of revenge against those

who have erased our lost words in the long

voyage of the millennia. Twentieth Century

dialect poetry is in Sardinia first of all a

poetry, a poetic word that bears the weight

of this immense tragedy, of this initial

trauma, which has become, as I stated

earlier, obsessive. More than anyone else, its

spokesman has been, writing in Italian and

Sardinian dialect, but at any rate always

with a sort of inevitable dialectality, a poet

such as Francesco Masala who, even when

he writes prose, has told this “history of the

vanquished” in an almost obsessive way,

allowing himself to be somewhat overcome

by it (with uneven, but at any rate never

really important, results), with a violent and

exasperated populism, not lacking a few

happy notes, between the epic and the

dramatic. Others, like Salvator Ruju, have