Gabriele Frasca

He has published the following collections of poems: Rame (1984; expanded edition: 1999), Lime (1995) and Rive (2001); the novels Il fermo volere (1987; II version, revised in 2002) and Santa Mira (2001); the collection of plays Tele. Cinque tragediole seguite da due radiocomiche (1998); the essays Cascando. Tre studi su Samuel Beckett (1988), La furia della sintassi. La sestina in Italia (1992) and La scimmia di Dio. L'emozione della guerra mediale (1996). He directs, along with Pinotto Fava the series «collana di testi fonografici» Audiobox, for which he has recorded with the group ResiDante, the work Il fronte interno (2003). He translated Philip K. Dick (Un oscuro scrutare, 1993 and 1998) and Samuel Beckett (Watt, 1998; Le poesie, 1999). In October 2003 Einaudi will publish his translation of Samuel Beckett’s Murphy. In 2004, again by Einaudi, his essay La lettera che muore. La «letteratura» e il tramonto della «civiltà della carta», will come out. With the publishing house d'if of Naples he will publish the definitive version of the novel-comic book Il fermo volere. Frasca teaches Comparative Literature at Università per Stranieri of Siena.

Frasca’s language resembles an organism which develops through syntactic concatenations, overlapping of sentences, sounds (inner rhymes, echoes, assonance, word-plays, alliterations), and a skillful use of the rhythm deriving from a mastery of poetical forms. As a matter of fact, Frasca mostly writes traditional forms: sonnets, quatrains, sestinas (of which Frasca is recognized as one of the most refined contemporary Italian craftsmen).

One should not think, however, of a sublime and archaic style: his language is direct and colloquial. Indeed, Frasca has a talent for reviving traditional forms and for making them part of our modern experience. But in his poetry the unremitting dialectic between tradition and innovation never lapses into violent subversion. The linguistic, rhetorical and metrical elaboration of his poems achieves an incredible synthesis of a baroque overabundance of words and a strange beckettian void.

His poems look like an uninterrupted and twisting flow of lines, in which words are shaped by metre, rhythm and rhymes, making them double their meaning, or produce inner resonances that would otherwise inaudible. Form appears to be the only remaining possible identity for an “I” doomed to a physical and spiritual degradation and prey to obsessions, fixations and emotional drives, to the limit of psychosis. A sort of magmatic and resounding stream-of-consciousness, Frasca’s poetry shows a nostalgia for a lost integrity, which is unmasked and scoffed at by the author with cruel lightness.

His poetry shows a poetic accuracy of rare integrity and a technical mastery that perhaps today, at least in Italy, is unrivalled. In his highly polished lines, compression and synthesis of forms, sounds and meanings are the main stylistic principle. Publications
Poetry
Rame (Milan, Corpo 10, 1984; II expanded edition: Genoa, Zona, 1999)
Lime (Turin, Einaudi, 1995)
Rive (Turin, Einaudi, 2001)

Novels
Il fermo volere (Milan, Corpo 10, 1987; II version, revised in 2002, in e-book: www.lettoricreativi.com
Santa Mira (Naples, Cronopio, 2001)
Il fronte interno (Rome, Luca Sossella, 2001)

Plays
Tele. Cinque tragediole seguite da due radiocomiche (Naples, Cronopio, 1998)

Essays
Cascando. Tre studi su Samuel Beckett (Naples, Liguori, 1988)
La furia della sintassi. La sestina in Italia (Naples, Bibliopolis, 1992)
La scimmia di Dio. L'emozione della guerra mediale (Genoa, Costa & Nolan, 1996)