Poetry
Sonnets
Sonetti romaneschi
Giuseppe Gioachino Belli · 1849
Synopsis
More than two thousand sonnets written in the speech of the common people of Rome, Romanesco, and devoted to the papal city. The poet wanted to make of them a monument to the Roman plebs: one hears pimps, prostitutes, gossips, priests and prelates, and one hears talk of the pope and the clergy, of poverty, sex and death, in a tone that ranges from irreverence to obscenity.
Context
The author composed his sonnets from 1 April 1829 to 21 February 1849, mostly in the thirties, and wrote in 1831 an introduction explaining their purpose. In his last years he asked that they be burned, which was not done, and his son Ciro published in the mid-1860s a heavily expurgated selection. In English, Mike Stocks translated a selection under the title “Sonnets”, and the novelist Anthony Burgess slipped a great many of them into one of his novels.
Who it is for
Sonnets to be taken one at a time, in the Roman dialect of the nineteenth century, often crude and always irreverent.
Prizes and reception
Gogol, quoted by the English publisher, said that the life of the Roman people is rendered in them with such truth that one cannot help laughing.
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