Ursule Molinaro

Ursule Molinaro (1916, Paris –10 July 2000, New York City) was a prolific novelist, playwright, translator and visual artist, the author of 12 novels, two collections of short prose works, innumerable short stories for literary magazines and dozens of translations from the French and German. She lived and wrote in French in Paris until shortly after World War II, when she came to New York in 1949 to work as a multilingual proofreader for the newly formed United Nations. Just a few years later, having realized that she would stay in the United States, she made the decision to systematically retrain herself not only to write, but to dream, think, and speak, in the language of her new soil. In the latter part of her life, she developed a method for teaching creative writing that relied wholly upon the oral and taught creative writing at several universities and in her home until her death in 2000.

Molinaro's texts attempt to fulfill a Nietzschian ideal. They hinge on the belief that there is a human supra-psychology that transcends nationality, gender, psychosexual archetypes, and individual linguistic heritages. Using a vast battery of unusual and privileged literary tools, she hoped to arrive at a new set of universals by the stringent crafting of razor-sharp narratives, which come to merciless, acerbic conclusions about culture and go so far as to radically reinterpret Greek myth.

Molinaro was a linguist and 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 smug civilizations inflict upon the visionary, who is often an artist.

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