Stefania Heim Translates Giorgio de Chirico

The Paris Review features an essay by Stefania Heim about her experience translating the Italian poetry of painter Giorgio de Chirico, published this fall as Geometry of Shadows (A Public Space, 2019). We'll take a look at Heim's process, where she writes:

For the past five years, I have been translating de Chirico’s Italian-language poems. They make up a relatively slim body of work beside both his heftier corpus of French-language writings—including his 1929 Hebdomeros, which John Ashbery declared the finest surrealist novel—and his prolific output of visual art, for which he is famous. His iconic paintings raucously combine scenes from memory (porticoes and Italian piazzas, smokestacks and trains in the distance), myth (gods, temples, ruins), and imagination (torsos crammed full of buildings or books, topped by the featureless faces of dressmakers’ dummies). These works operate on the principle of juxtaposition: surprise and longing spring from de Chirico’s placement of unlikely objects side-by-side. These images clearly have deep meaning for the artist (“We have said nothing about Chirico [sic]” muses Andre Breton at the start of Nadja, “until we take into account his most personal views about the artichoke, the glove, the cookie, or the spool”) and they pop up across his poems as well. Noticing them brings a detective’s rush of satisfaction. But, as Saussure taught us, the signifier is not the signified. How is a painted artichoke related to the word “artichoke,” to the word “carciofo”? What do the textures of language bring to the interrogation of tangible things?

As I translated, I became more and more convinced by de Chirico as a poet, as well as by the significance for him of writing in Italian. Juxtaposition and elision are some of poetry’s most fundamental building blocks—a potent, maybe inevitable outlet for his metaphysical collisions. In this particular arena of linguistic play, de Chirico seemed to find, too, ground for working out some questions concerning his own feelings about all of those objects and landscapes from his memory. It’s not that Italian feels more true or closer to his origins than French, the language in which his creative work appeared more frequently. Instead, Italian is a site of simultaneous proximity and distance, assertion and questioning, belonging and not.

Be sure to read on at the Paris Review.