Geometry of Shadows

De Chirico’s poems are as essential and as mysterious as his paintings.

―Jhumpa Lahiri

 

Gathered from early twentieth-century Italian magazines, manuscripts, correspondence, television recordings, and ephemeral art volumes, Geometry of Shadows is the first comprehensive collection of Giorgio de Chirico’s Italian poems, with award-winning poet Stefania Heim’s English translations presented alongside the Italian originals.

 

A multifaceted artist who lived in multiple languages, de Chirico was just becoming famous in France for the paintings that inspired surrealism when he returned to Italy in 1916 to enlist for the First World War. Quickly determined unfit for the front line, de Chirico was assigned to desk duty and began to write poems in his native language. Translating his iconic visual imagination into literary form, Geometry of Shadows is a gorgeous document celebrating the elasticity and innate potential of language, by an artist ever in pursuit of deeper understanding.