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

subterranean and quivering traces, the most

secret ties in the relationship of the authorial

self with the entire reality of his land.

Luigi Fontanella is therefore on the right

track in identifying the deep traces of Trofa’s

absolutely “modern” inventiveness in his

“skillful musical mix, whose ideal ‘fathers’

are Pascoli and D’Annunzio for the density

of onomatopoeias, homophonies, iterative

epanalepses, bold alliterations: the whole

thing often amalgamated in a

phonosymbolic process which nonethelesss

remains rooted in Trofa’s earthy spirit. In

him this work is the result of a constant and

careful polishing [...] Only thus will we have

the complete portrait of a poet who wrote a

small epic of his land in his ancestral

language, a brief symphony of subtle

elegance and genteel irony that speaks of a

Past-Present still open [...] even to the