Nina Cassian obituary | Poetry

Nina Cassian obituary

The poet Nina Cassian, who has died aged 89 in New York, her home since she gave up Romania for her safety's sake in the mid-1980s, produced more than 30 volumes of witty, vigorous verse, first in Romanian and, in her later years, in English. She was an entertaining reader of her own work, delighting audiences with her humour and vitality.

Her haunting poems addressed themes of childhood, ageing, exile, freedom of all kinds, creatures – real and invented – and, above all, love. These last could be fantastic, or direct and forthright, and occasionally extreme; Fleur Adcock, who wrote the introduction to Call Yourself Alive? The Love Poems of Nina Cassian (1988), remarked on the "startling physicality" of the writing. Cassian revelled in invented languages – devising one of her own, Spargan – and greatly enjoyed doing her party piece, her translation into Romanian of Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky.

Cassian also wrote books for children, worked as a film critic, and made translations into Romanian of classic poetry and drama, notably Shakespeare, Molière and Bertolt Brecht. When the poetry slowed down, she turned to painting or composing music, having had lessons at Bucharest Conservatoire from Constantin Silvestri, among others.

She had an arresting physical appearance. What she imagined to be her unattractive features – poems refer to "my ugly head", which she had to forget when playing with other children, or to "this odd triangular face" – in tandem with her passion and exuberance, gave her a striking, charismatic quality.

Nina was born Renée Annie Katz (Cassian was a pen name), the only child of cultivated but penniless Jewish parents in the Danube port of Galati; her father was a scholar and translator, her mother an accomplished amateur singer. Jewish traditions were only partially upheld in the household, a matter, she wrote later, of "culinary ecstasy rather than spiritual fulfilment". When she was a year old, the family moved to Brasov, and mixing with children in the Hungarian and German communities there gave her an acquaintance with their languages and a fascination with language in general.

When she was 12, during the second world war, there was another move, to Bucharest, where she was required to complete her secondary education in a girls' high school in the Jewish ghetto. She left Bucharest University after a year, feeling herself unsuited to traditional academic studies and made a romantic marriage to a good-looking young poet, Vladimir Colin, defiantly joining him in the banned youth wing of the Communist party. That lasted just six years, but her second marriage, to the older writer and editor Alexandru Stefanescu, to whom she was deeply devoted, endured until he died in 1984.

A first book of poems, published in 1947, was much influenced by French modernist poets, whose surrealist example featured in her work throughout her life. The hostile critical reception it had from the "official" literary journal of communist Romania was a very broad hint that she had not conformed to the preferred line. For several years she duly rendered her language simpler and her subject matter more ideologically acceptable. She was following her personal convictions at the time, but later she rejected most of what she wrote in this period.

The false dawn that came with the arrival in power of Nicolae Ceausescu in the mid-60s seemed a real one to many Romanians, as it did to some western observers. Cassian was "amazed" by the opportunity to write whatever she wished and initially impressed by the new president's desire to meet intellectuals and artists. But subsequently she would describe how, in a meeting she attended, Ceausescu, facing a formidable group of writers, merely shuffled his papers and avoided eye contact.

By the early 70s the door had closed again, but she still managed to publish books and sometimes obtain permission to travel abroad. An engagement to teach creative writing for a term at New York University in September 1985 changed her life utterly. While she was away, security police searched the home of her friend Gheorghe Ursu, an engineer and dissident poet, and discovered some satirical poems she had written about Ceausescu copied into his diary: Ursu was imprisoned and died, either from police beatings or from assault by a fellow prisoner, or possibly both.

Cassian, who had been widowed the autumn before, had no personal reasons for returning to be arrested and questioned, or worse. On learning that her flat in Bucharest had been searched and all her possessions removed, she resolved to remain in New York. The following year she applied for political asylum. She began to write original poems in English, which were published in the New Yorker and Atlantic Monthly magazines and collected into volumes such as Life Sentence (1990) and Take My Word for It (1998).

Her teaching of creative writing continued: at 72, she flew in from New York to give a week-long residential course (with myself) for the Arvon Foundation at their centre in Yorkshire. Her poetry was well served by translators, among them Adcock, Brenda Walker and Andrea Deletant in Britain, and William Jay Smith, Laura Schiff and Richard Wilbur in the US.

Her third marriage, in 1998, to Maurice Edwards, former artistic director of the Brooklyn Philharmonic, brought her happiness, security and an enhanced enthusiasm for travel. When she appeared on Desert Island Discs in 1999, the luxury she chose to go with her records (Chopin, Debussy, Bartók, Kurt Weill) was an ample supply of whisky and cigarettes; consuming those had been a lifelong habit.

She is survived by Maurice.

Nina Cassian (Renée Annie Katz), poet, born 27 November 1924; died 14 April 2014

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