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

time, can organize an effective and vigorous

poetic discourse which utilizes both ancient

and recent Neapolitan patrimony by

restructuring it in a new expressive fullness

with convincing and, I would say, significant

results. Sapegno points out that Pignatelli is

“within tradition, but beyond the line of Di

Giacomo and Russo, he knows how to take

the humors of Neapolitanness without

exploiting them, and transforms the

Neapolitan language into a high instrument

of poetry by infusing it with new freshness

and renewing its expressive felicity.”^18 This

seems to me a promising view for poetry,

whether or not Neapolitan. De Mauro has

also mentioned the “refined quality of these

poems”^19 , stressing how they remain

impressed in memory. This is still, if I am not

mistaken, “the deep, exciting manifestation