Thursday May 22, 2025
7:00 pm - 9:00 pm
POWERHOUSE Arena
28 Adams Street (Corner of Adams & Water Street across from the Archway)
Brooklyn , NY
11201
This event is cosponsored by David Zwirner Books and A Public Space Books
About the Book.
Join us for a conversation between Ara Merjian, Professor of Italian at NYU, and Stefania Heim, an author and translator of Mr. Dudron, on the Italian painter Giorgio de Chirico’s literary pursuits and the process of translating surrealist fiction, and the connection between literature and the visual arts.
Hebdomeros
Published by David Zwirner Books
This seminal 1929 surrealist novel by the painter Giorgio de Chirico merges the realms of dream and reality.
In the artist’s only novel, de Chirico invites the reader into a world where language, time, space, and meaning are fluid, highlighting themes of mystery, myth, and the uncanny. Following the titular character Hebdomeros as he embarks on a series of philosophical musings and bizarre experiences divorced from a specific place or time, Hebdomeros embraces ambiguity in a profound exploration of the subconscious mind. Highly visual passages evoke the landscapes and compositions of de Chirico’s metaphysical paintings, and non sequiturs mirror the freedom that Surrealism allowed for in art of all categories.
An introduction by the scholar Fabio Benzi contextualizes de Chirico’s work within a broader modernist framework, highlighting its influence on surrealism and its resonance with the literary and artistic movements of the early twentieth century.
Mr. Dudron
Published by A Public Space Books
The painter’s unpublished novel, an account of the misadventures of his autobiographical hero—a painter who wanders, dreams, remembers, frets, polemicizes, and tells stories.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.
About the Author.
The Italian painter Giorgio de Chirico (1888–1978) is best known for developing the style of metaphysical painting, which greatly influenced surrealism. Born in Greece, de Chirico studied in Athens and Munich, where he was inspired by the writings of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche and the work of Arnold Böcklin and Max Klinger. After a year in Florence, he moved to Paris in 1911 and began exhibiting his enigmatic paintings of deserted piazzas featuring Roman arcades and classical statues that cast long, illogical shadows. While serving in the Italian army during World War I, he integrated objects and depictions of canvases on easels from disorienting perspectives into his mysterious interiors and landscapes. After 1919, upon settling in Rome, he embraced the style and techniques of the Italian masters and executed more academic compositions, though by 1925 he was again living in Paris and had returned to metaphysical themes. He continued to paint until the end of his life, living between Italy and France, and at eighty years old he entered his neometaphysical period, reinterpreting the classical subjects from his early, disquieting work in serene atmospheres and bright colors.
About the Interlocutors.
Stefania Heim is a translator, poet, scholar, editor, and educator. As translator, she has published two volumes of writings by Giorgio de Chirico, both with A Public Space Books: his collected Italian poems, Geometry of Shadows, and his posthumous novel, Mr. Dudron, for which she earned a Translation Fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts and a ViceVersa fellowship at Villa Garbald, Switzerland. As poet, she has published two full-length volumes: Hour Book (Ahsahta Press, 2019), selected by Jennifer Moxley as winner of the Sawtooth Poetry Prize, and A Table That Goes On for Miles (Switchback Books, 2014), selected by Brenda Shaughnessy as winner of the Gatewood Prize. With Catherine Gander, she is editing the critical-creative collection Beyond Ourselves: Contemporary Poets on Muriel Rukeyser (forthcoming 2026, West Virginia University Press). A founding editor of Circumference: Poetry in Translation and a former poetry editor of Boston Review, she is currently Associate Professor of Literature and Director of Graduate Studies at Western Washington University.
Ara H. Merjian is Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the department of Italian Studies, where he is an affiliate of the Institute of Fine Arts, the Center for European and Mediterranean Studies, and Comparative Literature. He has written and edited several books, including Giorgio de Chirico and the Metaphysical City: Nietzsche, Paris Modernism (Yale, 2014) and Against the Avant-Garde: Pier Paolo Pasolini, Contemporary Art and Neocapitalism (Chicago, 2020), for which he won a Creative Capital/Andy Warhol Writer’s Grant. He edited the Brooklyn Rail’s issue on Surrealism’s centenary last fall, and is co-editor of Surrealism and Anti-Fascism, just published with Hatje Cantz. More recently, he published Fragments of Totality: Futurism, Fascism, and the Sculptural Avant-Garde (Yale, 2024) and Futurism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2025). His book Beat, Black, Queer: Pasolini’s Other America is forthcoming from Verso in October, and MIT Press will bring out three of his volumes on de Chirico in 2027. He has previously taught at Harvard, Stanford, and the San Quentin State Penitentiary College Education Program.