marcin
(Marcin)
#1
not prompted by patriotic fervor. Chiesa and
Tesio write: “In the attempt to find a
criterion to mark a point of departure for
Twentieth-Century dialect poetry, we have
had to concede that the numbers don’t add
up: there is no date in which chronological
and critical reasons coincide; or at least we
have not seen it. Di Giacomo published
various collections before 1901 (and in fact
he does not appear in Mengaldo’s anthology
to throw off the reckoning); yet anyone
working on dialect poetry cannot—it seems
to us —begin to talk about the Twentieth
Century without Di Giacomo: it would not
be possible to find the origin of the poetic
line that was to bear such fruits in our
century. It is precisely in Di Giacomo’s
experience that one can observe how an
epigon of the Nineteenth Century can
become the first poet in dialect of the