Vocabolario Napoletano-Italiano| compilato da Raffaele Andreoli. Napoli: Salvatore Di Fraia Ed., 1983.

There are many dictionaries for translating Italian into one of its dialects, and the dialect into Italian. The most frequent such that I have seen are Neapolitan and Sicilian but there are others. This Adreoli dictionary dates back to the 19th century, and seems to have been published and republished a dozen times or more by different publishers in Italy since then, presumably attesting to its popularity and utility.

Dialect poetry has in recent decades seen a revival of interest among Italian intellectuals, led by Pier Paolo Pasolini, the film maker and poet, arising in part out of fear that the standardization of Italian on radio and television has hastened the demise of the rich dialects of Italy.

The Legas Press at Brooklyn College, Luigi Bonaffini, editor, has issued several fine tri-lingual volumes of Italian poetry in recent years, e.g., Dialect Poetry of Southern Italy: Texts and Criticism: A Trilingual Edition (Brooklyn: Legal Press, 1997). I attended a reading from another volume in this series when that work was issued, at which the late Joseph Tusiani, a quadrilingual poet (Italian, dialect, Latin and English) read some poems in both standard Italian and in the Molise dialect to which he was born. To these ears, the dialect poetry was aurally far richer than the Italian, almost spine chillingly so. It made me rethink the disdain I felt for the dialect I heard spoken in New York, and realize how much I had missed in dismissing the dialects.

Raffaele Andreoli

16.5 x 11.5cm; 473 p.