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

and the slums, from the Vomero and San

Martino, from a play of the imagination that

belongs to men, to the landscape, to things,

but for this very reason (like Venetian)

balanced on the edge of a usura waiting to

make it flat and stale, a stereotype. This is

why Pignatelli is greeted with elation,

because, utilizing the whole Seventeenth,

Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century

tradition he can imbue it with a new vigor,

an inflection that comes from afar and

follows an ambiguous, multivalent path,

which is characteristic of the most recent

European poetry. De Mauro, in fact, makes

no bones about inserting Pignatelli among

the “great dialect poets of the Twentieth

Century”; he understands the full scope of

his importance, and the invitation is not

ignored by a poet and critic as observant as

Franco Loi who expresses his full agreement