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

director of RAI in Bari, an established

novelist, prolific essayist, many-faceted poet,

has bent Melfi’s dialect to markedly

experimental results in Giocodoca (Schena,

Fasano, 1981). The severed tongue of dialect

remains a collective instrument of identity

and recognition, although irony and skillful

wordplay overwhelm the subject at hand. In

Giocodoca Nigro employs his idiolect

polemically, in order to sing how for all of us

who tempt our luck is “a snake and ladders

game this passing day,” how “these words

are like a gunshot,” capable of raising

philosophical questions, even with the

political use of analogy. The twenty poems

o f Giocodoca, always graphically

(un)composed, with six dialect texts of

various texture, place Nigro, a keen student

of popular traditions and the southern

mindset, in the groove of the experimental