Written in Opitergino Mottense, the main dialect of the left bank of the river Piave in Veneto, the poetry of Fabio Franzin describes the harsh reality of factory work, finding spaces of companionship and tenderness in the eroded and marginalized landscapes of working class culture.
‘In the spirit & with the detailed intensity of Simone Weil’s La condition ouvrière & evoking the same quotidian vision of factory labour as Joseph Ponthus’s On The Line, Fabio Franzin writes from lived experience of the drudgery & dangers of repetitive manual work in language beyond the nous of most writers, providing us with a vital poetry of how many people are forced to live, translated here into English with genuine strength and sensitive receptivity by Cristina Viti.’
– Stephen Watts
Fabio Franzin is one of the most respected presences in the landscape of contemporary Italian poetry. His intense poems are deeply rooted in real-life experience, the experience of work in the factory, of shared toil and physical exertion. Yet this is much more than “workers’ poetry”: from the starting point of his living connection with the worker’s condition, Franzin soars towards the great horizons of hope and destiny, opening for the reader the boundlessly wide, lacerating, absolute landscape in which the word of poetry becomes
the word of every man.’
– Fabio Pusterla
Fabio Franzin was born in Milan in 1963. In 1970 he moved with his family to his father’s hometown in the Veneto. Between 1979 and 2022 he worked in various furniture factories, weathering and bearing witness to the decline of industrial economy and the uncertainties of enforced work flexibility. Since 2000 he has published several poetry collections in Italian and dialect; a volume of his collected poems is forthcoming in Italy. The many awards he has won include the Premio Franco Fortini, and for Fabrica, the Premio Pascoli.
Cristina Viti is a translator and poet working mainly with English, Italian and French. Her recent publications include translations of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s La Rabbia and Batool Abu Akleen’s collection 48Kg, both printed by Tenement Press.
