Journal Article

Unveiling Italian and Floridian Ecopoetic Voices: Translations and Cross-Cultural Perspectives

Johnson, Delaney

2025

Overview

Johnson successfully demonstrates how poetry and comparative studies can raise awareness and combat pressing environmental concerns. Its engagement with poetry from the Italian and Floridian peninsulas produced a fruitful cross- cultural dialogue. Common widespread issues were revealed in both contexts, providing insight to their particularly damaging effects on coastal landscapes. Furthermore, consideration of these concerns in poetry--such as coastal overbuilding, roadkill, and marginalization of nonhumans -- facilitated the exposure of the psychological phenomenon SBS. Moreover, examining local linguistic traditions with indigenous language and dialectal poetry broadened the conversation. The inclusion of these overlooked modes of expression uncovered pressing issues like language disappearance and the loss of environmental knowledge. In fact, as discussed, language can be considered an indicator of the state of the oikos and certain poetic voices hold valuable knowledge for combating urgent concerns. To continue and to expand this crucial dialogue, this methodology can be further applied to other languages and other landforms besides the two peninsulas, underlining how even very distant landscapes are interconnected and share similar ecological challenges.

• Publisher: University Press of Florida
• Subject: Ecopoetics / Environmental management / Indigenous languages / Italian language / Linguistics / Native languages / Poetry / Social exclusion