Profile:  Poet Nina Cassian

by Bill Raiford

Nina Cassian began a reading at Gallery RIVAA last month with:

Temptation

Call yourself alive? Look, I promise you

that for the first time you'll feel your pores opening

like fish mouths, and you'll actually be able to hear

your blood surging through all those lanes,

and you'll feel light gliding across the cornea

like the train of a dress. For the first time

you'll be aware of gravity

like a thorn in your heel....

The audience was then treated to a cascade of poems that covered a life:

From Part of a Bird

...the feeling of a light unchained body,

invulnerable, perfect, my head

just a natural extension of it....

From Kisses

Our kisses, hundreds, thousands-...

Oh, how jealous I am of the water you drink...

jealous of those unjust

partings of our mouths.

And the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) in its Poetry in Motion subway series used:

Please Give This Seat to an Elderly or Disabled Person

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 on me:

Pride, Loneliness and Art.

Last month Cassian read her poems at the International Festival of Literature 2005 in Galway, Ireland. The success of her readings has won her many invitations to perform in Europe and the United States as well as here on Roosevelt Island.

Nina Cassian was born in 1924 in Galatzi, Romania. As a five-year-old, she became engaged in her lifelong passions for music and poetry. After she played Bach at a musical conservatory in Bucharest, one of the instructors asked if she had a voice. Nina said, "No."

"That's too bad." said the instructor. "You are quite musical, but your hands are too small to be a concert pianist."

"I was 11," she told her Roosevelt Island audience, "and my hands were even smaller then. Look, it's just a pinky."

Cassian did become a composer, and her most recent composition, The Magic Clarinet, was performed at Carnegie Hall. When asked how music and poetry were related to each other, for her, she replied, "Surprisingly enough, they are not related except that both are creative activities. The disciplines are so different. One can say that Chopin has poetical music but that has nothing to do with poetry as such. Or one can say that Byron has a musical way of writing but writing has nothing to do with music as such.

"The learning needed to write music is so immense, the task is such an ordeal. You have to know so many technical concepts to compose and orchestrate. It is far harder, in my opinion, to be a composer than a poet."

When Cassian was 15, she joined a Communist youth group. At that time, on the eve of World War II, Romania had a strong Fascist movement, which her idealism led her to resist. She had to publish her music and poetry under strict government guidelines from 1948 to 1956. Then, there was a thaw.

In 1985, New York University invited her to teach creative writing. She had no plans to stay in the United States but, at that time, a close friend in Romania was arrested and the diary he had kept for 40 years was found by the police. It contained many conversations with Cassian in which she had made scathing remarks about the authorities. Her friend was beaten to death by the police. Cassian realized she could not return to Romania. She asked for, and received, political asylum. She moved to Roosevelt Island in 1987 and became an American citizen in 1994.

After she was wrenched away from her language and life work - her home and all her papers were confiscated - Howard Moss, then poetry editor of the New Yorker, said: "Nina Cassian strikes me as one of the best poets alive, who, through an accident of history, finds herself cut off from her native language and in a country where her work is mainly unknown."

After a lifetime of writing in Romanian, Cassian felt like writing her poetry directly in English. Many of these poems are in Take My Word for It, published in 1998 by W.W. Norton & Company. Norton had earlier published a book of her selected poems that had been translated into English by a host of poets including Dana Gioia, Richard Wilbur, Stanley Kunitz, and William Jay Smith.

Cassian is now completing the last of her three-volume memoirs. The first two were published in Romania, where Cassian returned to great praise. One reviewer wrote that the reader could learn more about the true nature of Communism from reading her memoirs than from reading a bookshelf of academic works on the topic.

Cassian indicates she is still battling with the language. "I can sing American pop songs from the 30's without an accent. Why? I learned them as an adolescent. But when I speak, I still have my accent. It's complicated to be reborn in a foreign language."

...Please God take pity

on my tongue,

on my glottis,

on the clitoris in my throat

vibrating, sensitive, pulsating,

exploding in the orgasm of Romanian.

(from Licentiousness)

Cassian has written more than 50 books, including some 25 of poetry. She published 12 children's books written in verse, many used in the school system in Romania. She has two volumes of short stories and also translated numerous works by such authors as Shakespeare, Paul Celan, and Bertolt Brecht, into Romanian.

"I enjoy being here," Cassian says of Roosevelt Island. "I enjoy Trellis. And I love the Thrift Shop. This is from there (holding her blouse). Almost everything is from there. I can't afford, as you do, the Gap. But I'm happy with this Thrift Shop. And, I'm getting poorer by the day. I don't know what will happen with the rent."

As she sips her beloved scotch and puffs on an omnipresent cigarette, Cassian speaks of a recent operation on her back: "It didn't help at all. The pain is still there. But I disregard my pain and act as if I'm ok." She smiles. "And do you know my big secret? I'm still young. Fortunately, my upper level, my penthouse, is still working."

Indeed, it is.