Translating Italian Surrealism

The painter's unpublished novel, an account of the misadventures of his autobiographical hero—a painter who wanders, dreams, remembers, frets, polemicizes, and tells stories. Translated from Italian for the first time into English.

Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978) was born in Greece to Italian parents. A gifted and prolific painter, de Chirico is considered the founder of the metaphysical school of art and a significant influence on the surrealists. Over the course of his long career, he was involved with many of the twentieth century’s major art-world figures: he designed costumes for Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes and set productions for Luigi Pirandello; he was photographed by Irving Penn. De Chirico was also a prolific writer. His French writing has been translated by John Ashbery, Louise Bourgeois, and others. Geometry of Shadows, a selection of de Chirico's Italian poems presented for the first time in English, is also published by A Public Space Books.

Stefania Heim is the translator of Geometry of Shadows, the Italian poems of Giorgio de Chirico. She has received a translation fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts as well as a fellowship to attend the ViceVersa Translation Workshop from Translation House Looren for her work on de Chirico. She is the author of the poetry collections HOUR BOOK and A Table That Goes On for Miles; and a contributing author to Midwinter Constellation, a radical experiment in poetic collaboration that responds to Bernadette Mayer's epic-in-a-day, Midwinter Day. With Catherine Gander, she is coediting Beyond Ourselves: Contemporary Poets on Muriel Rukeyser. She lives in Bellingham, Washington, where she teaches at Western Washington University.

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