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

impression of the “tragic” or the

“grotesquely” tragic, and never give in to

elegy, to regret and sentimental longing, to

games of imagination, of oblivion and flight:

that past, his past, is a nail, a boulder, a solid

consciousness of living that was, that is and

remains within, in spite of the deforestation

carried out by the culture of standardization

in the last forty years. In sum, a metaphor

conceived through a linguistic research in

the recovered, or to be recovered, archaic

warp, which does not give rise to gratuitous

phono-lexical preciosities, but rather the

will, eruditely constructed, to capture

human, social, natural identities not

representable in any other way: mystifying

mixtures of Italian and dialect, unfortunately

very common, are alien to Jovine, to his

rigorous linguistic and philological

discipline.