Our Translation Notes series invites translators to describe some element of their process for a recent translation. This week, Jamie Richards introduces an essay on craft by Marosia Castaldi, whose book The Hunger of Women Jamie recently translated for publisher And Other Stories.

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Jamie Richards: To introduce this essay by Marosia Castaldi, I want to first cite another essay of hers, which begins: “Everyone enters life and therefore writing in their own way. Some enter it as if into a dance or a comic or a film or a piece of music or a river or a courtroom. For me writing is inhabiting a space, entering it as if into a house a street a city, or sculpting a shapeless mass of material into a statue.”

Marosia Castaldi was an Italian writer active in the final decades of the twentieth century. Her writing, sui generis, is spatial in more ways than one: space is thematized, whether as the delimited space of a room or the expansive space of a city, and the page itself is conceived of as a space. This is evident to different degrees in her work, notably in the novel The Hunger of Women, originally published in 2012 and in my translation in 2023 by And Other Stories. The book follows a middle-aged woman on a journey of self-discovery after the death of her husband, where she opens a restaurant out of her home, and seeing her daughter come of age and find independence, explores the sensual pleasures of food and the love of other women.

These are the material events that form the skeleton of the story, but the heft of the work all lies in its poetic, cosmic abstraction that sets these women within a universalizing framework of philosophy and myth. Formally, this is achieved in part by a near total elimination of punctuation, so that the novel contains only a couple of commas and no periods, instead indicating sentences by initial capital letters. But her phrase units tend to be short, or tend to the list, facilitating the conveyance of sense, so that the result is primarily a shift in rhythm, where each thought and event flows into the next. In the following brief essay, written in connection with seminars she gave at the Lalineascritta creative writing school, Marosia focuses on the comma, framing what appears to be her idiosyncratic use of it within literary history

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Marosia Castaldi: The comma has always seemed to me like a weak sign, a sign incapable of splintering the world the way the period can, and that breaks the flow, the continuity between things. Montaigne has it otherwise, as in the Essays where he has long, extraordinary lists using commas: “What of the hands? We beg, we promise, call, dismiss, threaten, pray, entreat, deny…”

To me, the comma resembles the empty space between objects, but the air we breathe, what we call a void is also matter, and therefore the matter of a space can also interact with the matter of discrete objects. The skin of the one can migrate into that of the other. It is true: separation exists. It exists between mother and child, between lovers, between me and a pitcher, and, at the end of it all, there’s only one great separation: death. Death and separation resemble the period. At least it’s more real. The comma resembles the separation between objects: it’s not as real. Maybe it’s useful for reminding children that zucchini are not carrots and carrots are not zucchini and that people are not goats and goats are not people and therefore they need to be separated with commas. It’s useful for school. But if you think of the infinitely small, like cells atoms atomic particles, and the infinitely large, galaxies constellations, then the differences start to dwindle, the thousands and thousands of stars resemble the thousands and thousands of particles.

Da mi basia mille deinde centum,
dein mille altera dein secunda centum.

Give me a thousand kisses, then a hundred,
then another thousand, then a second hundred.

Catullus, in the Carmina, understands that in love we have to wear down the skin, enter into the other, make an endless repetition of kisses to penetrate the barrier of separation. A thousand and a hundred kisses and particles and stars.
Lucretius, whose atoms are still Democritean, particles full of emptiness, in De rerum natura invokes Venus, the Goddess of love and generation:

Efficis ut cupide generatim saecla propagent.

Kindling the lure of love in every breast,
Thou bringest the eternal generations forth.

The chain of time that continually generates life and death, the succession of generations, is the vision that enables us to bear the separation of atoms in space and the terror of our own death.

I’ve never used commas much. I tend to eliminate them: they are an obstacle a stone to step over a boulder. Of course they’re necessary. There’s always the risk of incomprehensibility. But they’re not that necessary. Sometimes they are and sometimes they aren’t. Moreover if in writing we didn’t have the freedom not to have rules even when transgressing them, that is, the freedom not to turn transgression into rule, all writing would be an exercise in style and not an encounter with the world. If we dispense with a certain punctuation mark or use it sparingly, if we place an unusually long space between words, if we have fifty paragraph breaks or none, it’s because we want the page to be, not to represent, what we want to say. Writing can’t circle around its subject, it must forge it every time anew.

In my first book, Abbastanza prossimo [Close Enough], where the whole world is in pieces and people lose pieces of their bodies, the text is paratactic. Lots of periods. Almost no commas:

I wake up at seven. Or so. I head to the station, get on the tram, the strawberries give me hives. I make a coffee and drink it slowly sitting down. Looking outside. In winter everything is dark. I take a long time to decide what to wear. Green tie with horizontal dark red stripes blue bow tie with green polka dots in orange wool with diagonal stripes. Green. Dark red with blue checks. Little. One I still have in solid color wool received as an eighteenth birthday present. Red. Silk with black-lined arabesques. Small. Soft. Green. Our housekeeper prepared my clothes every night. My grandmother bought them. She left for her town. She died.

In my most recent book, Per quante vite [Through How Many Lives], where the fragmentation is shaken into an indistinct flow, a magma of matter, the winding of events and things into one another, both the comma and the period tend to disappear:

[…] I pick up the pen I paste pictures ticket stubs cards corks papers letters notes all the things that life leaves me: a note written by my brother the day before the day when he didn’t know he was going to die letters from friends pictures of students restaurant menus travel brochures papers picked up off the ground scraps of fabric a photo of my mother walking down the stairs one of my father walking down the street one of my brother holding my father’s hand on another street a milk pitcher from a hotel in Prague two frogs from the river where we spent our childhood two compositions from school newspaper clippings with the world’s wars a picture of a child looking at me through a window with a bullet hole a stone angel’s wings and the angel’s hand coffee grounds sugar residue from the bottom of a cup cake crumbs a bird’s wings two plane tickets to Boston a greeting card a childhood poem half-burned candles a photo of the Gulf of Naples […] like an immense sewer or great sky. In any case you can’t pass through it.

In both the former and the latter example, and years of work in between, it’s clear that the comma has never been a significant mark for me. I wonder how Flaubert managed not to suffocate to death after writing the dense pages of Bouvard and Pecuchet filled with zippy dialogue where all those dashes commas colons must have been a torment, a situation on the brink of collapse.

Punctuation marks are props impediments instruments supports weapons. It depends on whoever is wielding the knife, in other words the extent to which a person is able to come to terms with the infinite void of the blank page.

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Marosia Castaldi was a Neapolitan writer and artist who spent most of her life in Milan, where she died in 2019. Her oeuvre includes the short story collections Abbastanza prossimo (1986), Casa idiota (1990), Piccoli paesaggi (1993), the prose collection In mare aperto (2001), the theatrical text Calco (2008), and the novels Fermata km 501 (1997), Per quante vite (1999), Che chiamiamo anima (2002), Dava fine alla tremenda notte (2004), Il dio dei corpi (2006), and the monumental Dentro le mie mani le tue. Tetralogia di Nightwater (2007). The Hunger of Women, her first book to appear in English, was nominated for the Strega Prize in 2012.

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Jamie Richards is an American translator of Italian literature. She has translated books by Viola di Grado, Roberto Saviano, Igiaba Scego, Ermanno Cavazzoni, Manuele Fior, and others. Her writing and translation have appeared in periodicals such as Granta, Firmament, The Florence Review, Asymptote, and Words Without Borders. She has received a National Endowment for the Arts translation fellowship and was recently translator-in-residence at the University of Iowa.