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. Translations 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). Personal beliefs Molinaro's emphasis on the self-created individual set her against family values and procreation. She saw the family as a prison and childhood as a long period of bitter incarceration that provides no basis for true identity but is rather a powerful force that seeks to inhibit it. She believed that such a prison could be escaped by an act of the will, through clear-sightedness, linguistic prowess and the development of deep reflection. Her texts, which often employed unusual spacing between words and lines as a means to create spoken rhythms, could not have been written without her wide experience as a translator and linguist. She believed that truth could be captured in the careful crafting of language and that no human experience was beyond the power of language. Painting 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.