Nina Cassian

Romanian writer

Nina Cassian (pen name of Renée Annie Cassian Mătăsaru; 27 November 1924, in Galați – 14 April 2014, in New York City) was a Romanian poet, children's book writer, translator, journalist, accomplished pianist and composer, and film critic. She spent the first sixty years of her life in Romania until she moved to the United States in 1985 for a teaching job. A few years later Cassian was granted permanent asylum and New York City became her home for the rest of her life. Much of her work was published both in Romanian and in English.

Nina Cassian was born into a Jewish family in Galați in 1924, the only child of Iosif Cassian Mătăsaru, a translator, and an amateur singer. In 1926 the family moved to Brașov. Cassian's fascination with languages is said to date back to that time of her childhood since this is when she started spending time with children from the German and Hungarian community. In 1944 she entered the Literature Department of the University of Bucharest, but abandoned her studies after one year. Most interestingly though, Cassian also formed a very close friendship with the famous poet Paul Celan during the time he lived in Bucharest (1945–1947). Along with other writers and artists, Celan and Cassian played surrealist games such as "Questions and Answers" or "Ioachim", which is the Bucharest version of André Breton's famous game, Exquisite corpse. Cassian and Celan bonded over their fascination for languages and used multilingualism as an inspiration for their work. and her first poetry collection, La scara 1/1 ("Scale 1:1") in 1947. These early publications were greatly influenced by French modernist poets she had spent time with, especially the surrealist writers are said to have had a lasting influence on Cassian. Scared by that fierce criticism, she then turned to writing in the proletkult and socialist realistic fashion. This phase lasted for about eight years. In an interview in 1986, she explains why she made the choice to focus on children's literature: “It was in 1950, during the dogmatic period in Romania. Socialist realism is, unfortunately, characterized by the restraining of structures and styles and vocabulary. [ ] So when I was asked to write in a rigid and simplified manner, I tried to do my best, but after awhile, I switched to literature for children because it was the only field where metaphors were still allowed, where imagination was tolerated and assonance was permitted.”

Cassian travelled to the United States as a visiting professor for creative writing at New York University in 1985. Eventually, she became an American citizen. In the US, she started writing poems in English and published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly and other magazines. Some of these poems were also published in collections, for example Life Sentence in 1990 and Take My Word for It in 1998, both of which are still available today. In the US, she was married to Maurice Edwards. Cassian died of a cardiac arrest or heart attack in New York on 14 April 2014. She is survived by her husband.