"It’s intriguing to see that in resistance to the general drift towards the international—a game of polarities if you like, where one trend is confirmed by the extent to which it provokes its opposite—there is also a flourishing of dialect poetry, texts comprehensible only for a very small community (I cannot understand the poetry of my close colleague Edoardo Zuccato in the Milanese dialect). But such poetry is almost always published with an Italian translation alongside it, suggesting the poet’s desire for intimacy and authenticity on the one hand and an eagerness, perhaps anxiety, to be widely understood on the other. Any eventual translations, of course, will be made from the Italian, not the dialect." Tim Parks • NYRB

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