Ursule Molinaro

Ursule Molinaro (1916, Paris –10 July 2000, New York City) was a novelist, playwright, translator and visual artist, the author of 12 novels, short stories and prose works for literary magazines, and dozens of translations from French and German. She lived in Paris and wrote in French until shortly after World War II, when she went to New York in 1949 to work as a multilingual proofreader for the newly formed United Nations. Just a few years later, having decided to stay in the United States, she began to write professionally in English. In the latter part of her life, she developed an original method for teaching creative writing, which she taught at several universities and in her home until her death in 2000.

Molinaro was a world traveler and a woman who participated in the artistic milieus of late Modernist Paris, Abstract Expressionist and then Off-Off Broadway New York, London, Rome, Lisbon, and provincial America. She was fluent in English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Greek. Her English was slightly and delightfully accented, while German and French were her native tongues.

In 1958, she was co-founder and fiction editor of Chelsea magazine.

Like Vladimir Nabokov, Molinaro was a fully realized transplanted writer. She wrote mostly about the immediate experiences and situations of her characters, who would resort to memory only as a repository of regrets and mistakes or as a grim tale of something that had to be escaped.

Molinaro's novels often portrayed women with a disregard for the exigencies of their social situation: In The Autobiography of Cassandra, Priestess and Prophetess of Troy, her most blatantly feminist novel, the prophetess relates her own doom and oppression from a privileged psychic level---that of a person who is dead. What Cassandra tells is not only the story of power robbed from women but also the shoddy treatment civilizations inflict upon the visionary, who is often an artist.

In her novel Fat Skeletons, a translator wary of serving unappreciative publishers attempts to pass her own novel off as a translation. In the Old Moon with the New Moon in Its Arms, a patrician poet of ancient Greece scandalizes her parents by offering herself as a religious sacrifice. It is a self-destructive gesture that rejects birth and family, yet reaches out to a larger kind of social and spiritual truth.

Molinaro's greatest theme is the existential ability of the individual to remake herself. In her fiction, her characters fall into two types: insular, fiercely independent people whose entire identity has been self-created by the exercise of will—usually with a flouting disregard for convention or tradition—and people who are comically mired and rooted in their own pasts, a fact that usually makes them laughable, self-righteous clichés.

Molinaro translated many texts from French and German. In collaboration with the German expatriate Hedwig Rappolt she translated Christa Wolf's novel Kindheitsmuster (Patterns of Childhood). On several of her translations, she collaborated with her close friend, the writer Bruce Benderson, who now serves as her literary executor. Molinaro also subtitled a number of films including Une femme mariée (Jean-Luc Godard, 1964) and Le Bonheur (Agnès Varda, 1965).

Molinaro was also a painter in the style of the Haitian primitives. She was deeply interested in astrology and numerology and wrote two books (The Zodiac Lovers; Life by the Numbers) on these subjects.

• L’un pour l’autre (The Imposture) (Julliard, 1964) aka The Borrower: An Alchemical Novel (Harper & Row, 1970)
• Green Lights Are Blue: A Pornosophic Novel (New American Library, 1967)
• Sounds of a Drunken Summer (Harper & Row, 1969)
• Encores for a Dilettante (Fiction Collective, 1977)
• The Autobiography of Cassandra, Princess and Prophetess of Troy (Archer, 1979)
• Positions with White Roses (McPherson, 1983)
• The New Moon with the Old Moon in Her Arms (Women's Press, 1990)
• Fat Skeletons (Serif, 1993)
• Power Dreamers: The Jocasta Complex (McPherson, 1994)

• Nightschool for Saints, Second Floor, Ring Bell (Archer Editions, 1981)
• Thirteen: Stories (McPherson, 1989)
• A Full Moon of Women: 29 Word Portraits of Notable Women from Different Times and Places (Dutton, 1990)
• Demons & Divas: 3 Novels (McPherson, 1999)

• Petit manuel pour la circulation dans le néant (Durand, 1953)
• Rimes et raisons (Regain, 1954), poetry
• Mirrors for Small Beasts (Noonday, 1960), poetry
• The Zodiac Lovers (Avon, 1969)
• Life by the Numbers: A Basic Guide to Learning Your Life Through Numerology (Morrow, 1971)

• One Must Be Two (1956)
• The Engagement (1960)
• The Thirteenth Christmas (1960)
• The Abstract Wife (1961)
• The Sundial (1961)
• The Tourniquet (1961)
• After the Wash (1965)
• Breakfast Past Noon (1967–68)
• Antiques (1975)
• The Baby Prelude
• Tyrant(s)

• Uwe Johnson, Speculations About Jakob (Grove, 1963)
• Reinhard Lettau, Obstacles (Pantheon, 1965)
• Uwe Johnson, The Third Book About Achim (Harcourt, 1967)
• Hermann Hesse, Narcissus and Goldmund (FSG, 1968)
• Claude Ollier, Law and Order (Red Dust, 1971)
• Christa Wolf, Patterns of Childhood (FSG, 1980/1984)
• Philippe Sollers, Event (Red Dust, 1986)