Stefania Heim
Photo by Peter Pihos
Bio
Stefania Heim is a translator, poet, scholar, editor, and educator. Geometry of Shadows,her book of translations of Giorgio de Chirico’s Italian poems is forthcoming in 2019 with APS Books. Her other translations of de Chirico’s works have appeared in A Public Space, Metaphysical Art, and numerous exhibition catalogs. She is author of the poetry collections HOUR BOOK (Ahsahta Press, 2019) and A Table That Goes On for Miles (Switchback Books 2014). A founding editor of CIRCUMFERENCE: Poetry in Translation and former poetry editor of Boston Review, she holds degrees from Harvard College, Columbia University, and the CUNY Graduate Center. She teaches at Western Washington University.
This grant from the National Endowment for the Arts is a tremendous vote of confidence and boon to my translation work. Though I have always been a translator, my public life in the art had for many years focused on editing and teaching translation. In 2003, I co-founded the journal of poetry in translation CIRCUMFERENCE with Jennifer Kronovet, through which we introduced many urgent new translations to audiences, supported contemporary translators, and built community. When my friend, the poet Brett Fletcher Lauer, introduced me the trove of unpublished writings by Metaphysical artist Giorgio de Chirico and asked me what I thought, I was immediately hooked. Thus began a five-year-long-and-counting apprenticeship to the great painter’s writings.
De Chirico’s novel, Il Signor Dudron, has many of the qualities of de Chirico’s most engaging work in all media:the gravity and color given to the smallest details; the associative drift; the material quality of words that crash against and caress each other; his surreal movement from metaphor to conflicting metaphor; the relative lack of what might be described as plot; the metaphysical haunts. The text deepens our understanding of this complex artist’s imagination. This grant from the NEA will allow me to complete a translation of the novel.
from Mr. Dudron by Giorgio de Chirico
[Translated from the Italian]
At seven precisely, the same rumble he heard in the afternoon alerted Mr. Dudron that the hour of departure had sounded. He went down and sat beside the modern Valkyrie. At once, she took off at breakneck speed, but she drove with such confidence and mastery that the car seemed transformed; it was no longer an automobile constructed of metal and wood, but something enormously elastic; it lengthened and contracted as necessary; it passed between two obstacles, grazing them with its metal flanks, emerging like an enormous flow of draining pasta water, with the movements of a gigantic, high-speed caterpillar, only to plunge between two other obstacles even closer together than the first. They were crossing the city’s outskirts. At that hour, numerous laborers, having finished work, were returning home on their bicycles. They were setting off toward their hearths pedaling patiently and blocking the entire street.
They were pedaling patiently to reach their hearths where, waiting for them were their wives, their children, their parents—everyone they loved, everyone to whom they were devoted above all else, notwithstanding the arguments that frequently erupted, and the misunderstandings; even if, sometimes on Sundays, to relax and escape the tedium of family, to enjoy an hour or two of freedom, they abandoned their houses to go to the nearby tavern and meet their friends and co-workers. With them they emptied bottles of wine and cider and pitchers of beer, playing cards and billiards, or when it was nice out, bocce behind the tavern, in the courtyard surrounded by fences, where the sunflowers appeared.
In spite of the street crowded with vehicles of all types, the modern Valkyrie, with confidence and ease that astonished and amazed Mr. Dudron, slid between one cyclist and another metamorphosing her car into a kind of eel; she passed between a car and a pedestrian, between two pedestrians, with stupefying agility. Once they were out of the city’s suburbs, the car sped onto the wide roadway in the middle of the countryside. Meanwhile evening had fallen. In the north, toward those heights where they were heading, storm clouds had gathered. The wan lamplight made the black outline of the mountains jump out, in particular one with a distinctive crenellated peak, which, almost bristling with enormous teeth, looked like the jaw of a felled dragon and had been dubbed "The Great Saw." Finding herself on the empty road, the driver accelerated her pace. Mr. Dudron started to feel ill. With an uneasy eye he followed the movement of the hand on the dial of the speedometer: 65, 70, 75, 80, 105, 110, 115, 120, 125, 130 … one hundred thirty kilometers an hour, and it was the dead of night, they were far from the city and the storm was approaching rapidly from the heights where they were directed. A couple of raindrops started to fall, making the road horribly slippery. Mr. Dudron was afraid. The darkness was complete; even inside the car darkness reigned. Only, in front of the driver, one or two dials were faintly illuminated by a bluish, cold, dull, lunar, unsettling light that made one think of clinics where deathly ill patients who have just been operated on doze off, or else of laboratories in future times, where strange and infernal inventions are perfected by genius scientists with hydrocephalic heads, similar to those little monsters conserved under alcohol. Across the windows and sides of the car you could hear the incessant biting wind rustling at ever-higher speeds.
About Giorgio de Chirico
Giorgio de Chirico was born in Volos, Greece, on July 10, 1888, 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. De Chirico was also a prolific writer, in both French and Italian, of poems, novels, a memoir, critiques, and treatises. Hebdomeros, his novel in French, was declared by John Ashbery to be the finest example of Surrealist literature. De Chirico also spent his life working on another novel, his self-proclaimed master text—written by turns in both French and Italian—which remained unpublished except in excerpts while he was living. Il Signor Dudron was finally published in Italian in 1998, twenty years after de Chirico’s death. The artist died in Rome at the age of 90.