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

himself in the dialect of the Sarcidano

region, almost untranslatable into another

language, being so deeply rooted in that

very ancient linguistic, oral and popular

habitat typical of his land, which is

increasingly an expression of the feeling of

not belonging and of independence always

resurgent in the island. It is a dialect that has

something esoteric, initiatory about it, a

language to be spoken inter nos, itself an

instrument of that sentiment of opposition

and revolt whose banner it becomes.

In Lobina, as at any rate in all Sardinian

dialect poets, we find that underlying

religious sentiment which is never an end to

itself, but is itself an instrument of ethnic

opposition, of belonging to a people that

speaks “its” language and feels it must

defend “its” ever-threatened identity from

other peoples and other languages. In the