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

this lost dimension, aiming at “reproducing”

it, between melancholy and irony, through

the “restoration” (Biscardi) of a language

salvaged from the contaminating landslide

of modernity.

The poet’s memorial tension leads him to

a meticulous and guarded linguistic

selection aimed at capturing the most

archaic and “pure” vernacular, not yet

corrupted, with a strongly-felt urgency to

bring back to light the true identity of the

Campobasso dialect, immune from patched-

up modernizations. This operation, which

often risks a certain predictable coldness, is

carried out with a conscious and studied

philologism, precise and sober, neither

folkloristic nor academic, balanced between

a scrupulous visual/memorial investigation,

meticulously transcribed, and the sudden

impulse of the most authentic emotion, if