Giorgio de Chirico is famous as a visual artist, but less well known is his prolific career as a writer. Considered the godfather of surrealism, his trajectory as an artist proved lastingly controversial.

It is hard to overstate the influence of his early artistic phase—of so-called metaphysical aesthetics—upon 20th-century modernism. In the early 20th century, we read again and again that the two pillars of modernism were on the one hand Picasso and on the other de Chirico. De Chirico was taken up and lionized and became in many ways the touchstone for surrealist paintings. The paintings of Magritte and Dalí, with which we’re so familiar, were essentially unthinkable without de Chirico’s figurative cityscapes, particularly deserted cityscapes, of which MoMA is the biggest owner in the world.

But in 1919 he came to renounce the paintings that he created on the eve of World War I in Paris and then during the war in Ferrara where he served as an office orderly. He turned back to classical painting, to academic painting. After his departure, he was denigrated by the surrealists, even as they clung to his earlier work. In fact, Louis Aragon, the French critic, erstwhile surrealist before he left surrealism for communism, said in a review of Hebdomeros that while de Chirico’s painting hand should be cut off, his writing hand was in fact still full of magic.

And intimately familiar with this magic is Stefania Heim, a translator, poet, scholar, and educator who has published translations of two volumes of writing by de Chirico, both from A Public Space Books: his collection of Italian poems, Geometry of Shadows, and, recently, his posthumous novel, Mr. Dudron, for which she earned a translation fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and a ViceVersa Fellowship at Villa Garbald, Switzerland.

Also recently reissued by Zwirner Books is de Chirico’s earlier novel Hebdomeros, a book which has circulated in English for several decades but whose translation remains unattributed. Its first most famous iteration was introduced by the New York School poet John Ashbery and reprinted a number of times. Mr. Dudron, by contrast, was never published in de Chirico’s lifetime.

In May, I joined Stefania Heim at Powerhouse Books in Brooklyn to discuss what it means to think about Mr. Dudron and Hebdomeros, which are quite experimental and very much ahead of their time, as well as what it means to be a visual artist simultaneously engaged with forms of literary and poetic narrative. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity;

—Ara H. Merjian

Ara H. Merjian (AHM): Originally published in French (and in Paris) in 1929 before being translated by the author himself into Italian, Giorgio de Chirico’s Hebdomeros has been deemed “a novel without a plot.” Subtitled “The Painter and His Genius as a Writer” (“Le peintre et son génie chez l’écrivain”), the book (characteristically) flatters the author’s own contemporary imagery. But it also helped to inaugurate what we might call the surrealist novel (despite de Chirico’s embattled status with that movement). If de Chirico’s painting at this point has taken an often turgid and self-serious turn, the writing in Hebdomeros is playful, ironic, whimsical. It bears its own share of pedantry, to be sure. But de Chirico is most concerned with this novel in evoking a sense of Stimmung, of mood. And some of his evocations of landscapes and throwaway anecdotes prove mesmerizing in their eccentricity.

Hebdomeros has been reprinted in English a number of times, but Mr. Dudron only came out in both French and Italian around 1998, 20 years after de Chirico’s death. Before that, it went through a number of iterations in various languages, fragments, and assorted notes. Can you tell us a bit about this later novel?

Stefania Heim (SH): As I was rereading Hebdomeros in preparation for our talk, I was struck again by how much Mr. Dudron feels like it extends out from Hebdomeros. There are these moments that repeat from the first novel to the second. And so there is this real sense, as with the repetitions in de Chirico’s visual art, that he was engaged in a lifelong project of pursuing strange images and using the tools of different artistic mediums to get at their full possibilities.

There’s evidence that De Chirico started writing Mr. Dudron as soon as he finished Hebdomeros. And he kept writing and publishing stories about the adventures of his autobiographical artist (anti)hero through the 1970s in both Italian and French, many, but not all of which are “re-mixed” into the full-length version I’ve translated. If the novel has a plot, it’s just the waves of Dudron’s daily coming and going, his often-humorous encounters with the city, other characters, and paintings that bleed into memory and dreams. The different scenes and vignettes are woven through the novel with long quotations from art criticism and rants about the contemporary state of art. It can feel like a wild mash-up of modes and forms and styles. And it’s important to remember that the novel was never published in a complete form as a novel during de Chirico’s lifetime but discovered in manuscript form after his death. Of course, we can talk about whether or not this is the final book—what this book even is in all of its iterations is all very contested and quite interesting.

AHM: De Chirico began Mr. Dudron in 1934 but never finished it. It remained extant in a number of disparate versions and editions, from the 1930s up through an excerpt published as late as 1976 in Italy. The book appeared in French and Italian versions a few decades ago. So, 30 years after its first editions, you rescued it for English. How is it that you came to translating the novel?

SH: I came to translating de Chirico very much by accident. About a decade ago, my good friend Brett Fletcher Lauer—a brilliant poet, and a person who just knows things—happened upon a batch of de Chirico’s Italian poems on the Giorgio and Isa de Chirico Foundation website and sent them to me with an email that just said, Hey, are these any good? So I read them, and I was like, Yes, they’re really good! And then he said, Well, will you translate them for me?

I translated the poems for Brett first, and he brought them to Brigid Hughes at A Public Space who published them first in the journal and then was excited enough about the project to take on the full volume of poems as A Public Space’s second full-length book, Geometry of Shadows. The experience launched me on this unexpected journey that I am still on. I’m not an art historian but I do study 20^th-century experimental literature. I had always known de Chirico’s paintings, but I hadn’t known him as a writer. The poems in Geometry of Shadows have so many moments that evoke his visual art. And the pieces from early in his career were also immediately recognizable to me as modern experiments, modernist poems. In de Chirico’s paintings, he manipulates space. In his writing, he does a similar thing, but he’s manipulating grammar. It’s very hard to make English do the sorts of things that he does with Italian.

While I was working on the poems, I had an occasion to go to the De Chirico Foundation in Rome—an extraordinary little museum in his apartment right next to the Spanish Steps—and they gave me the Italian version of Dudron that came out in 1998.

So I started translating this novel, which is strange and surprising. And I think over the course of translating it, I started to see the ways in which de Chirico was engaged in this lifelong project with multilingual variations and iterations that are not contained within a single book, or at least not a book that can ever be finished. The project felt very similar to other 20^th-century literary experiments that I was seeing in American poetry.

AHM: In the introduction to Mr. Dudron, you talk about the fact that, a hundred years later, the book can be seen as having anticipated certain creative literary practices.

Both Mr. Dudron and Hebdomeros betray de Chirico’s penchant for codes and esotericism. So the latter’s title conjures up the hebdomadaire, the French word for a weekly publication, whereas Dudron is a portmanteau for Nord-Sud, or North-South, which could allude either to his own formation between the Mediterranean and Germany, or to the French avant-garde journal, Nord-Sud (which ran for fourteen issues between 1917 and 1918).

Michel Leiris, a French surrealist author, said that Hebdomeros takes us into vast promenades, but also small rooms. I wonder if you sense that same kind of spatial layout in Mr. Dudron? How do you see the two novels in relationship to each other?

SH: Both books have an eponymous hero or antihero. They both are centered around this character, a figure, who is, in both cases, a painter and, in both cases, very much de Chirico himself. It’s interesting to think about the differences between them because Hebdomeros is younger, maybe sexier. It’s easier to get behind him, whereas Dudron is a grump.

Hebdomeros moves through strange and interlocking but not necessarily connected interiors and exteriors and its form is almost vatic, whereas Dudron starts with him taking a nap and ends with him going to sleep. Dudron’s character is confusing. In some ways, he’s supposed to be the Great Painter but also he’s a bit of a buffoon. There are these utterly amazing hilarious scenes like one where he’s bemoaning the fact that he lives in this building or boarding house that has what they call full “pensione” so people can take all of their meals there but Dudron can’t afford it, so he has to go out and buy his own meals and it’s incredibly humiliating for him. There’s this long passage that describes him putting baguettes in his pockets and salami—it goes into great detail about all of his food that he has to carry and bring with him. He’s sweating and he’s afraid as he walks past these rich people and when he finally makes it to his room he collapses into his chair. The juxtaposition of this pompous figure who is bemoaning the direction that modern painting has taken with this self-lampooning guy trying to hide a huge baguette in his pocket creates this kind of tension that to me feels quite purposeful.

In Zwirner Books’s reissue of Hebdomeros, they’ve included one of de Chirico’s paintings, The Return of Ulysses, which is part of a pair of paintings from the late 1960s and early 70s. It depicts Odysseus at sea, but he’s actually contained in a room on this cartoonish body of water. That tension of an exterior contained and held within an interior is I think the structure that both of these books hold on to and that links them. I write in my introduction that when I was translating I came to see Mr. Dudron as a literary encapsulation of this set of paintings.

AM: There’s a version of a very similar image which he’s titled Hebdomeros (1968), so there’s a kind of slippage between them that again links his writing and his visual art.

In the cantankerous and grumpy and curmudgeonly tone of the book, de Chirico is really flogging many of his aesthetic ideas but also constantly criticizing his contemporaries.

His memoirs are some of the most bilious things you will ever read. The gist of things is that modern art is a sham and that most 20th-century artists are complete charlatans. He talks about Munich as having given birthplace to the two twin evils of the 20th century, Nazism and modernism.

This is an individual who had renounced any claim to avant-garde and modernism. When he’s writing Mr. Dudron, he’s writing a treatise on how to mix painting pigments, he’s talking about his love for Titian and Renoir and Velázquez. The kind of classical and academic canon that modernism had set aflame. The narrative constantly slips in and out of actual (playful) narrative and (often heavy-handed) theoretical arguments.

In the opening of Mr. Dudron, a friend comes to take him to a local snail farm where they are going to have dinner. The friend talks about how the snails feed themselves and are eventually harvested, and he writes these bold and colorful descriptions. “Mr. Dudron, though, has a horror of mollusks in general and of snails in particular because, as he says, he feels an innate aversion to anything flabby or lacking internal structure. This was one of the reasons he did not love the paintings of his contemporaries. …” So again and again, at the first bout of narrative momentum, the text slips back into these denigrations of everyone from art dealers to art critics to the painters they help promote.

Essentially, the novels form screeds against contemporaries, against artists who have occupied themselves with aesthetics ways different from his own. Perhaps you can talk about one of the novel’s more remarkable elements—namely, that it does not issue from a single narrator (or as you rightly put it, antihero), but from a kind of double voice which includes that of a woman.

SH: To respond super quickly to de Chirico’s bilious and cantankerous bits, I want to mention that one thing that is quite strikingly different between the two novels is the structure of these screeds.

I’m so glad you mentioned the Memoirs because this gets at another way he plays with form. In both novels de Chirico ends up making what I find to be a documentary move. The documentary practice of taking research materials or tangible language from elsewhere and putting it into a creative text is super vibrant in poetry currently and a pretty radical thing to do at the time. People often locate its roots in 1930s leftist movements, with writers like Muriel Rukeyser and Charles Reznikoff.

There’s a single moment like this in Hebdomeros where he drops in language from political posters. In Mr. Dudron, he weaves his own writing with extensive quoting from an existing 19th-century tract on painting. The structure of the novel incorporates this kind of external material, and I started noticing how when he does this in Dudron the formal move is happening in the same moment that he’s talking about material in visual art. He uses the documentary move to highlight, in a different form, what he is critiquing about the lack of materiality in painting. In both cases I think maybe he wants to underscore the physical and tangible.

Some of the stuff he’s mad about is definitely bonkers, but some of it is quite moving and convincing—like that people have moved away from working with their hands and they’re not making their tools with their hands and so they’ve lost a relationship with the materiality of that which they make.

This feels echoed in the double voice you mention. He has this interlocutor named Isabella Far which is also the name of his second wife, or the name that he gave her, and he makes her a character in this novel and he calls her “she of the philosophical spirit.” She’s the greatest thinker about art and he places his own screeds in her mouth.

Dudron, who’s the autobiographical character is sitting around when she walks in. He asks her questions, and she lectures him. Then, in real life, in his 1945 essay collection Commedia dell’arte moderna, he publishes some of these very same essays that are quoted in the novel under her name, even though we now know that he wrote them.

AM: Yes. On the surface of things, it’s progressive, this incorporation of a female voice. But I think in the end it proves a relatively insidious kind of ventriloquism. She has no agency as an individual or as an author.

I think you’re right his turn to the past and to tradition is bound up with this kind of fetishization of craft. People don’t know how to mix their own tempera anymore, he whines. People don’t know how to actually really refine their brushes. These complaints are bound up not only with an antimodernist stance, but also disdain for anything common. He was himself of lapsed aristocratic origins and was fundamentally Nietzschean in his very patrician disdain for the “herd.” And so because modernism had itself become this widespread phenomenon, he recoiled from that.

I also think you’re correct in underscoring the self-irony and humor in these works. There are ways in which he pokes fun at himself. But this is also a deeply insecure individual. He is constantly denigrating “pederasts,” the early 20th-century word for homosexuals; but there’s a good deal of evidence that de Chirico himself was, if not homosexual, then homoerotically inclined, including painting and drawing men at different seaside baths—

SH: With Herculean arms—

AM: Yes, also gladiators wrestling. There are a lot of paradoxes in play. Again, I think the use of a female double is potentially progressive, but the way it comes off is actually deeply instrumentalizing.

Myth is always there imbuing our ordinary lives with meaning, but I find that myth is always rendered somewhat ridiculous at the same time.

SH: I think it’s interesting, though, that she doesn’t really get lampooned in the way that Dudron does. There’s not a lot of character development in either of these novels—that’s not what they do. But there are also other interlocutors for Dudron in addition to Isabella Far. He has a lot of doubles, scenes where he interacts with other artists. In one, he meets a friend who he says is also a great artist and they start talking about another friend who has a one fatal flaw which is that he thinks that he’s a great cook.

This other friend tells Dudron—“I’ll make you my best spaghetti. I’m the best at making spaghetti”—and then he tries to make mayonnaise and in both cases it’s this horrible failure. It becomes this extended scene full of hysteria and physical comedy. I’m wondering how you read those. Are the other artists also doublings, or is de Chirico maybe dispersed throughout these various characters in the novel?

AM: The question of doubling is something that comes out not only in this novel but in Hebdomeros.

De Chirico was born to Italian parents in Greece, more precisely in the town of Volos—ancient Iolkos, where Jason and the Argonauts set sail for the Golden Fleece. He and his brother Alberto Savinio—a prominent writer and painter and critic and musician in his own right—invoked those origins for their whole lives: not only as individuals, but as artists steeped in the ancient Mediterranean and its myths. They called themselves the Dioscuri—the twins Castor and Pollux—and so everything in their life was seen through the lens of ancient myth.

This often happens in the most casual of ways, as in the novel when, at one point, there are two bottles on the table, one larger than the other, and Dudron calls them Ajax and Achilles. At one point he talks about the wind and mentions Aeolus and Boreas. The woman who comes to pick him up for dinner he calls the “modern Valkyrie.” Even northern gothic myth in a sense forms part of this constant seeing the world not just in terms of its materiality and realism but mythical precedent—a narrative that subtends and precedes the present, shaping how we experience it through ancient precedent. It is something you write about very eloquently in your introduction, Stefania.

That’s part of his magic as an artist as well. He writes about seeing storefront displays as entire landscapes of mythical significance, finding battles in the shallow space of a shop window. Or as you pointed out in terms of the return of Ulysses, even in our bedrooms we dream ourselves into other worlds, landscapes, voyages, and so that doubling of contemporary reality and myth is always percolating in the novel.

SH: For me it cuts in both directions at the same time. Myth is always there imbuing our ordinary lives with meaning, but I find that myth is always rendered somewhat ridiculous at the same time. There will be some kind of expansive mythic moment of imagining, say, a dragon—and then the dragon is just a lizard.

AM: And that’s where the humor lies. You’re absolutely right that there’s a play with myth. It’s not necessarily the high myth of Periclean Athens. It’s rather a way of seeing, yes, a lizard as a dragon. Even as it is present to others, Dudron’s gaze (like de Chirico’s) is always also elsewhere, untimely—and in that simultaneous and effortless displacement lies his privilege as a “seer,” a clairvoyant.

SH: Yes, which is very lonely in some way.

AM: It’s not a generous world; it is hemmed in by its privilege.

SH: He’ll hold a rock up to the light and then suddenly be in the time of Greek myth. There’s a repeated image that appears in both of the novels and across his work that I’d love to hear your thoughts on. He talks often about loving to see statues on low pedestals. Statues on low pedestals are not elevated above us—they can walk right off of and into the crowd.

AM: Yes, he ascribed that notion to Schopenhauer in his early manuscripts. A statue is itself a double for the human body, and thus can appear almost like an individual in the crowd, even in its inanimacy. It again makes for an uncanny doubling of the human.

There are glimpses in Dudron of these motifs from his early Metaphysical work. One passage where he talks about passing a piazza surrounded by porticoes, surmounted by houses

whose blinds were all closed … the car’s headlights illuminated violently and for an instant a large basin in the middle of which a tall jet of spurting water. … The sight of that fountain which in the middle of a deserted piazza in that deeply sleeping town immersed in darkness, gloom and solitude continued to spurt, to shoot its jets of water and profusion into the air and to raise in song in the profound night awoken Mr. Dudron’s strange and highly metaphysical feelings.

And “metaphysical” is of course the name that he gives to his mode of painting in the early 1910s. I noted the heroic effort of translation of these elaborately ramified Latinate sentences that you nobly rendered into English with all of their various sub-clauses—not an easy task.

SH: It was pretty fun actually. These ways in which he literally knits sentences together made me think about how syntax can be very visual. In so many of de Chirico’s sentences, you don’t really know at first what you’re looking at or what will come next because he leads you through the sentences as though he’s directing your eyes across a landscape or over a canvas. He uses syntax to create movement.

There’s one of these instances that I love which I’m going to read—and you’ll get a chance to see how long the sentences are. This is from a moment in which out of nowhere a son appears. We learn that Mr. Dudron had a son named Bruno who was a prodigal son who left him, and so he’s bemoaning this son leaving. He writes,

Yes, their dove had flown like a coward, treacherously he had flown. The years had passed, more or less sad, more or less gay, as all years pass.

Now down in that great city, white and solemn, where the militarized and uncompromising tribunes kept watch in their severe black uniforms. Grown Bruno, successful Bruno leaned out under the vault of vast cupolas to listen to the sonorous and polyphonic waves that climbed and climbed without rest from the melogenic caverns, from the caverns where formidable orchestras took shelter in tight and disciplined ranks, directed by conductors with thick ruffled heads of hair, who with horrendous grimaces and epileptic gestures pushed ever higher the sublimity of the great unfinished symphonies.

AM: It’s a mouthful. It’s worse than German in some ways. And again, that’s this kind of turgid, Latinate sentence structure which can be really maddening and difficult to translate from the in Italian. And you’ve done a beautiful job.