The wind, the fresh new wind
Of March, it shakes it shakes,
Beneath the ashen clouds,
The boughs beyond the wall.
The wind, the wind still cold, —
With just March-hints of warmth, —
It blusters and it blusters,
Racks shutters, doors, and halls.
The wind, the madcap wind
Of March, it flits about
The temples, tousles, on
One’s forehead, hairs gone gray.
It whispers in our ears:
Things we no longer want
To know, to hear, it loves
To tell, it loves to say.
Vento
El vento novo, el vento
de marzo, el scassa el scassa
soto el ziel color zènere,
i rami drio d’i muri.
El vento ancora fredo,
za tèpido de marzo,
el scantina el scantina,
el crùzzia porte e scuri.
El vento, el vento strambo
de marzo, el ne scarufa
su le tèmpie, el ne svèntola
in fronte i cavei grisi.
El ne parla in orècia:
robe che no’ volemo
più saver, più sintir
el ne conta, el ne disi.
In six volumes of verse Virgilio Giotti (1887–1957) fashioned an utterly unique voice within the Italian literary landscape. Born in Trieste when the city was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, Giotti chose to write in a refined variant of his local dialect rather than in standard literary Italian. This allowed him to sidestep the bookish and oratorical aspects of the Italian tradition and to tap into the stream of popular European lyric running from archaic Greece to German Lieder. Giotti added to this an acute visual sensibility all his own and an interest in contemporary aesthetic debates. Although his use of dialect has rendered his work less well-known than it ought to be, Giotti has been celebrated by the likes of E. Montale and P. P. Pasolini and is the object of increasing interest from Italian scholars and critics. His natural peers are lyricists like Sappho, Heine, and Hardy.