The Monk and the Child

Fabrizio Bajec

Fabrizio Bajec, a Franco-Italian citizen (1975), studied French language and literature in Italy at the University of Viterbo (doctoral thesis on the revision of the autobiographical genre) before moving to Paris, where he has been teaching since 2008. He is a poet, playwright and translator of William Cliff (Il pane quotidiano, 2007, and Poesie scelte, 2015), as well as playwrights such as Christophe Pellet, Jean-Marie Piemme and Adam Rapp. His first collection, Corpo nemico, was published in Italy in the ‘Eighth Notebook of Contemporary Italian Poetry’ (2004). A second booklet, Gli ultimi, was published in 2009, followed by a larger collection, Entrare nel vuoto (2011, finalist for the Giosuè Carducci, Giuseppe Dessì and Città di Marineo awards). He has written plays for the stage that have been performed in Milan, Rome and Viterbo, including Aiuto (2005), Ouverture (2006), Électre (2007), Rosario (2007) and La Donna che ride (finaliste at the 2006 Betti Prize). His first play written in French, Rage, was staged by INSAS students under the direction of David Strosberg at the Théâtre national de Bruxelles in 2009, as part of the ‘Écritures’ drama festival, and was published by Éditions Tituli in 2017. Entrer dans le vide, (Le Fram, 2012), the first collection written in French, has many differences from the Italian version, both in terms of structure and content. Loin de Dieu, près de toi (L'Âge d'homme, 2013) is published in a bilingual version. La cura (Fermenti, 2015) is his second book of poetry. The collection La collaboration (tituli, 2018) will be followed by an Italian-language version. From 1999 to 2006 he wrote a number of reviews and essays on poetry for the activist journal Annuario di poesia (Castelvecchi editore), edited by Giorgio Manacorda and Paolo Febbraro. This publication remains a benchmark for Italian literary criticism (between 1994 and 2012). In 2015 he wrote an essay on his experience of self-translation for the journal Transalpina, Université de Caen. His poems have appeared in a number of journals, including Nuovi Argomenti, Le Fram, Poésie Première, Europe, Le journal des poètes, Décharges and A l'indexe, and on literary websites such as Le parole e le cose, Officina Nuovi Argomenti, L'estroverso, Nazione Indiana, Ce qui reste, Révolution Permanente and Sitaudis, as well as in anthologies of new Italian poetry: Samizdat (2005, Castelvecchi), Mosse per la guerra dei talenti (Fara, 2007), Poesia d'oggi (Elliot, 2016).