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

is a point of arrival, not a starting point, after

a very complex and intense literary

experience always at the forefront of

European and American culture: and this

means that the “arrival,” achieved in a

highly specialized workshop, can be better

understood as a metalinguistic experiment,

not classifiable with the usual hermeneutical

schemes (the discovery of “native roots,” the

rejection of urban, industrial, technological

alienation, the return to the “town hall,” to

alleys and piazzas that no longer exist ─ at

least for the historical, communal function of

gatherings and oral communication ─, to

long-gone traditions: real referents

objectively erased, if ever truly semanticized

by the author, who is curved almost

exclusively on the mirror of the self. In

reality, for Rimanelli it is dialect itself that

become the only referent, which with its