Acerca de

 

Cumae is the first trilingual work, published by Marsilio in 1998, twenty years after Sovente’s  debut. The book is divided into six sections, each one characterized by a specific theme: history, Eros, the animal world, Campania, the linguistic form and the dialect of Cappella, his homeland.

Natural symbols like water, fire, mirror, moon are recurrent natural symbolisms which offer a repertoire of images inherited from classical and traditional culture.

In 1998 the work won the Viareggio-Rèpaci Prize in the Poetry section and drew the attention of readers and critics, as it was and still is, an original experimentation in the poetic panorama, not only for its trilingualism, but also because languages considered dead like Latin and the dialect, dialogue and confront each other.

The same text is, in fact, written in Italian, Latin and the Cappellese dialect. Every language has got its own function and meaning. The Cappellese dialect is the language of childhood and family; Sovente doesn’t choose Neapolitan which already has its own literary history in poetry and music, but he prefers his native vernacular, never used before in poetry and more genuine.  Latin represents, on the other hand, the language of the ancestors and of the mythical past of the Phlegraean Fields; Latin lives of classical, medieval and ecclesiastical reminiscences, but it is revitalized by an original creativity in the use of verses and rhetorical figures. Italian, in the end, is the language of literature, life and contemporaneity. The lexicon is essential, concrete and modern.

Quodlibet published a critical edition of it, commented by professor Giuseppe Andrea Liberti, who studies the origin of the poems and gives an attentive and precise interpretive analysis of them.

Many poems from Cumae deserve attention and deal with themes connected to the Phlegraean Fields, such as Ruderi, Le antiche donne cumane, Di là, Parlerai, Donna flegrea madre and Camminado per I Campi Flegrei.