#RivetingReviews: THE HUNGER OF WOMEN by Mariosa Castaldi – Jamie Richards in conversation with Clarissa Botsford

A Conversation with Jamie Richards, Winner of the 2024 National Translation Award in Prose for Mariosa Castaldi’s The Hunger of Women (And Other Stories, 2023) 

CB: A striking aspect of the novel is that there are no full-stops, just capital letters to indicate sense units. I sing early polyphonic music where there are no bar indications, but rests where other voices come in. This made me realize how solo-voiced The Hunger of Women is. 

JR: It’s not exactly stream of consciousness, because the narrative is only partly recognizable as thoughts. it’s certainly like being thrown inside the narrator’s head.

CB: But she suddenly throws in blasts from the outside: Hiroshima or a Nazi concentration camp or something equally unexpected.

JR: It’s still very much in the realm of subjectivity, what this individual perceives and reflects. But part of that, and Castaldi’s writing in general, is a very powerful sense of place which can manifest in different ways, including the historical.

CB: I saw in your translator’s note that Castaldi succumbed to anorexia. In her intense focus on food, constantly giving us recipes for every occasion, I also felt a strong sense of disgust, a kind of primordial “body shaming.” 

JR: This fits in with her sense of the grotesque, the overladen banquet tables, the bacchanalia. The “body shaming” is internalized or just of another generation: archetypes that may overlap with autobiography. But it also comes from art, where women are depicted as being sensual, or even cartoonish, and food is a form of pleasure that feeds that sensuality. 

CB: There’s also the religious aspect: food is sacred, and cooking her sacred duty handed down across generations. Food is transubstantiation, literally the host. This fits with the lives of women saints who denied themselves food and had visions. 

JR: I would say she was culturally religious. There’s a web of references, and they all play a part without being dominant. The religious imagery is a counterpoint to the classical excess. 

CB: Why do you think she felt the need to label “lesbian love”? 

JR: It does seem a bit overt, not acknowledging that there are other lesbian novels or movements happening. But it’s important to remember how rare lesbianism has been in Italian literature, and perhaps naming it is necessary to keep it from being glossed over. It’s almost like she has to say “this is lesbian,” even if it’s also a metaphor. 

CB: She also makes explicit comments about how different sex is with a man. 

JR: Yes, this would fit into second-wave feminism that imagines society or a nonhierarchical existence without men. The novel is called The Hunger of Women, right? 

CB: And it’s not only waves but generations: Rosa’s mother is an archetype, a sacred figure, a yardstick against which she measures others.

JR: There’s a narrative about independence, or parallel tracks, because the daughter is growing up and going off. And Rosa is in a second phase of life, achieving autonomy. And part of that is she rejects domesticity. One of the things that keeps coming up is the dust, and the accumulation of physical matter.

CB: The bones! Traditions handed down: her dowry tablecloths get stained in the restaurant. She washes them and puts them back in the dresser, also an heirloom, along with the bones. 

JR: Some of this was very weird to translate. This is very hard book, in a way. Syntactically, a book like this is easier to translate than long sentences with subordinate clauses that can clog up Italian prose. There’s some imagery I couldn’t quite account for. I wish I could have asked her because some of it felt like psychic detritus.

CB: I really admire your ability to use cognates even with highly unusual words. Did you choose to use them to mirror the sound or mirror the difficulty? 

JR: Using cognates can feel like a failure for us translators. But this is also a challenge of register. Sometimes it’s good to introduce a cognate that would be unusual in English and remind people it exists.

CB: Take the word icosahedra, for example, which means 20-faced. I would have agonized about whether to stick in a “multifaceted” or “many-faced” to help people understand. But you didn’t help anyone in that sense: icosohedra it was. 

JR: The book allowed for, or even called for, certain things. I mean it didn’t seem like a book that was supposed to be too easy to read, right? But the fluidity of the narrative compensates for those difficult points, like rocks in the sea.

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Jamie Richards is a professional literary translator. Her work focuses on contemporary and twentieth-century Italian fiction and comics. The recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship, she holds an MFA in literary translation from the University of Iowa, where she was recently translator in residence, as well as a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Oregon. She currently resides in her native Los Angeles after many years in Milan.

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Clarissa Botsford has worked in the fields of teaching, intercultural education, editing, translating and publishing and is also a singer, violinist and accredited Humanist Celebrant. Her recent literary translations include works by Elvira Dones, Valerio Magrelli, Alessandro Baricco, Viola Ardone, Lia Levi and Sasha Naspini.

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Read Clarissa Botsford’s #RivetingReview of THE HUNGER OF WOMEN by Mariosa Castaldi

Read Clarissa Botsford’s #‎RivetingReview of THE COLOUR LINE by Igiaba Scego – Igiaba Scego in conversation with Clarissa Botsford