Nina
Cassian, an exiled Romanian poet who sought refuge in the United States
after her poems satirizing the regime of President Nicolae Ceausescu
fell into the hands of his secret police, died on Monday at her home in
Manhattan. She was 89.
The apparent cause was a heart attack, her husband, Maurice Edwards, said.
A
prominent writer and translator in Romania before she was forced to
seek asylum in 1985, Ms. Cassian had since become well known in the
West. Her poems — some translated to English; other, more recent ones
composed in English — have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic
Monthly and elsewhere.
Her
English-language collections include “Life Sentence: Selected Poems”
(1990), “Take My Word for It” (1998) and “Continuum” (2008).
Intense,
passionate and cleareyed, Ms. Cassian’s poetry often centered on the
nature of erotic love and — both before her exile and after — of loss,
death and decay. In “Ballad of the Jack of Diamonds,” published in The
New Yorker in 1990 in a translation by Richard Wilbur, she wrote:
Here is the Jack of Diamonds, clad
In the rusty coat he’s always had.
His two dark brothers wish him dead,
As does the third, whose hue is red. ...
One brother, on his breast and sleeves,
Is decked with tragic, spadelike leaves.
The next has crosses for décor.
The motif of the third is gore.
The Jack of Diamonds is dead,
Leaving a vacuum in his stead.
This ballad seems at least twice-told.
Well, all Rumanian plots are old.
But
Ms. Cassian’s work could also be mordantly funny, as attested by
“Please Give This Seat to an Elderly or Disabled Person,” displayed in
New York City subways by the Poetry in Motion program, a joint effort of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and the Poetry Society of America:
I stood during the entire journey:
nobody offered me a seat
although I was at least a hundred years older than anyone else on board,
although the signs of at least three major afflictions
were visible on me:
Pride, Loneliness, and Art.
Ms.
Cassian was born Renée Annie Katz to a Jewish family in Galati,
Romania, on Nov. 27, 1924. Her father was a noted translator who
rendered into Romanian the work of writers in German and English,
including Edgar Allan Poe.
When
she was about 11, her family settled in Bucharest; there, under
Romania’s fascist wartime leadership, she attended schools in the Jewish
ghetto. As a teenager she joined a Communist youth organization:
Communism, she felt, offered a more salubrious alternative to fascism.
Trained
as a pianist from the time she was very young, Ms. Cassian studied
painting, literature and composition at the University of Bucharest and
at the city’s main conservatory; her musical compositions, many for the
piano, were well regarded in Romania.
Her
first volume of poetry, “La Scara 1/1” (“On a Scale of 1/1”), appeared
in 1947 under the pen name Nina Cassian. It was condemned by Romania’s
Communist authorities for its Surrealist cast and lack of appropriate
ideology.
For
the next few years, Ms. Cassian’s work hewed to the Socialist realism
the party preferred, but she found she could not stand that way of
writing and reassumed her own style.
Ms.
Cassian’s first marriage, to the novelist Vladimir Colin, ended in
divorce. In 1985, not long after her second husband, Alexandru
Stefanescu, died of cancer, Ms. Cassian traveled on a Fulbright
fellowship to the United States, where she taught writing at New York
University.
While
she was in New York, a Romanian friend, Gheorghe Ursu, an engineer and
poet known for opposing the Ceausescu government, was arrested by the
Securitate, the state secret police. Tortured, he died of his injuries.
Among
Mr. Ursu’s papers, the Securitate found several unpublished poems by
Ms. Cassian in which she lampooned the Ceausescu regime. It was no
longer safe for her to return home. Granted asylum in the United States,
she settled on Roosevelt Island in New York City, where she lived until
her death.
Mr.
Edwards, the retired executive and artistic director of the Brooklyn
Philharmonic, whom she married in 1998, is her only immediate survivor.
Ms.
Cassian’s other work includes the English-language collections “Call
Yourself Alive?” (1988) and “Cheerleader for a Funeral” (1992), as well
as her translations into Romanian of Shakespeare, Brecht, Molière and
Paul Celan.
Though
she moved with apparent ease in American literary circles, reading and
lecturing widely, Ms. Cassian by her own inclination remained something
of an outsider. She was amused, for instance, by a practice she deemed
singularly American, in which a poet giving a reading precedes each work
with a précis of the very work to be read.
Parodying this practice, as The New York Times reported in 1995, Ms. Cassian liked to say:
“There
was a pear tree on my grandfather’s farm, and one day I noticed that
when its blossoms fell, they looked like dandruff falling on my
grandfather’s shoulders. So I wrote a poem about it. It goes like this:
On my grandfather’s farm
there used to be a pear tree.
When its blossoms fell,
they looked like dandruff
falling on Grandfather’s shoulders.”
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