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

observer.

To these fundamental interpretive keys

to Giuseppe Jovine’s dialect works should be

added the declared and provoking

perception, or discovery, of dialect as a

connotative instrument well capable of

understanding, expressing, and even

amplifying the semantic makeup of the

“classics,” thus asserting itself, with

undoubted dignity, as a code which is not

only denotative, limited to an emarginated

community of speakers, but as an

“autonomous” system, perfectly able to

capture, formalize and communicate the

“sublime” meanings of life, be they

projected onto the classical world or found

in modern reality. This is the sense of Chi sa

se passa u’ Patraterne [Who Knows If The

Almighty Is Going By], 1992 ─ a collection of

translations from Martial, Horace and