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

passage of his inner self that pursued the

gesture, the sigh, the scent of words ancient

and new that had remained on the sideline

(or, if you like, in ambush), but ready to

release their energy if pushed into the

struggle by a feeling that melted into song

through means known only to the

miraculous unions that take place in the

“occasions” of poetry. Franco Loi first, in the

preface to Mal’aria [Evil Air], in 1990, and

Franco Brevini later have underlined the

innovative elements Serrao introduced in

the Campania tradition. And Cesare Vivaldi

stressed the “hard and closed dialect... and

yet very sweet, whispered, full of

diminutives” to point out how the poet has

been able to employ the linguistic

instruments, forcing them to clash and then

wresting from them that knelling sound

which is the imponderable component of