Posh audiobook brought out by the Casa Radio Publishers in Bucharest

Poet Nina Cassian's voice and poems, remembered

Eugen Nasta, 08.03.2025, 14:00

An audiobook made of a printed book and a CD, Dance, has enjoyed a tremendous success. It includes poems read by Nina Cassian and was re issued by the Casa Radio, Radio House Publishers. The recently-released edition is a substantially updated edition, including poems read by the author and an interview on Nina Cassian’s work and immigration. The interview was conducted by Radio Romania journalist Emil Buruiana.

The new audiobook was compiled and released in an anniversary context, since in 2024 we marked 100 years since Nina Cassian’s birthday. Basically, it includes 51 poems Nina Cassian recorded with Radio Romania, between 1959 and 2003. Literary critic Cosmin Ciotlos wrote the foreword, while the author of the illustrations is Tudor Jebeleanu.

An essayist, a translator, a composer and visual artist, Nina Cassian hails from a family of Jewish origin. When she was a teenager, she began frequenting leftist intellectual circles. At the aged of 16 she joined the Communist Youth organization, then an illegal entity. Young Nina Cassian dreamt of absolving the world of all its fundamental antagonisms between sexes, races, peoples, classes.

Her editorial debut occurred in 1947, with a surrealist volume of poems, Scale 1/1. However, in the wake of an ideological attack then the newspaper Scanteia The Spark launched against her, Nina Cassian gradually begam to write avowedly proletarian poetry. After an eight-year-long roundabout, in her own words, Nina Cassian returned to authentic poetry and started writing literature for children as well.

As a translator, she created remarkable Romanian versions of works by Shakespeare, Bertolt Brecht, Christian Morgenstern, Iannis Ritsos and Paul Celan.

A superb poem for children “The Tale of Two Tiger Cubs, named Ninigra and Aligru”, earned Nina Cassian the Romanian writers’ Union Prize in 1969. In 1985 Nina Cassian was a guest professor in the United States’ New York University. When she was there, Nina found out about the arrest and murder in prison of dissident Gheorghe Ursu, a close friend of hers.

In his diary, confiscated by then the Securitate the name of Nina Cassian was mentioned, and so were her political opinions, blatantly anti-Ceausescu. Nina stayed in the United States while her apartment in Romania was confiscated and her books banned from publication and retired from libraries until the collapse of the Ceausescu regime.

In the United States, Nina Cassian published translations of her poetry written in Romanian (”Life Sentence”), as well as poems she wrote in English (”Take My Word for It!”, ”Blue Apple” şi ”Lady of Miracles”), for which she scooped New York Library’s Silver Lion Prize in 1994.

Nina Cassian spent the last 30 years of her life in New York. There she wrote her memoirs, which she described as a major project of her age and life, a mirror of the stolen and given years. Entitled Memory as Dowry the three volumes were brought out in Romania over 2003 and 2005.

Attending the launch event staged by the Casa Radio Publishers were the curator of the recent edition of the Audiobook entitled Dance, literary critic Cosmin Ciotloş, filmmaker Alexandru Solomon and writer Călin-Andrei Mihăilescu.

Cosmin Ciotloș spoke about the longevity of Nina Cassian’s poetry.

” What I was mainly interested in was how much of Nina Cassian today’s Romanian poetry has preserved. And when I say today’s I have a broader timespan in mind. It struck me that, for instance, many of the puns in Florin Iaru’s poetry are legitimately, beautifully, graciously indebted to Nina Cassian’s poetry. Mircea Cartarescu’s poems in the volumes A Night at the Opera or The Levant, dedicated to Ion Barbu, do not go straight to Ion Barbu but they pass through Nina Cassian’s filter.

On the other hand, it struck me that the very young poets of today to an appreciable extent resonate with Nina Cassian’s poetry. They are a bunch of youngsters I have totally placed my stakes on because they can shake a little bit the way too troubled and way too visceral waters of my generation of poets whom I otherwise hold most dear, but towards whom in no way can I perform an exercise in worship. I mainly have in mind those who publish on the platform known as The Sonnets’ Mafia, the very young Ioan Coroamă, Florentin Popa or Mihnea Bâlici, they are youngsters on whom, again, I have totally placed my stakes.

That being said, our response to what Nina Casian left behind her as something important in poetry should be far from a mere indiscriminate admiration. It is a poetry that needs to be filtered rationally, it needs to be properly documented, and, at the endpoint of this documentation, apart from the ethical stance we can judge, more or less, we shall soon find out we have interacted with a vivid stylistic formula. A stylistic formula which is still productive, and we do not owe that to Nina Cassian’s longevity, but to the longevity of Nina Cassian’s wit. “

A Canadian resident since the late 1980s, writer Călin Andrei Mihăilescu met Nina Cassian first in 2 Mai, the Romanian Black Sea resort where she used to spend her summers, and then in New York, decades later.

”This is an audiobook, so you can hear Nina’s voice recorded on the radio between the late 1950s and the early 2000. And I can say Nina Cassian’s voice is very high, were we to place her in a pantheon of the great Romanian voices. Hers was an educated voice. It was an extremely clever voice, at one refine and erotic. I got to know better Nina in New York in the last 20 years of her life. There was a time when I went there once a month doing creative writing workshops, alternatively, in Romanian and din English, or in both languages in one single session.

I was doing those workshops together with Nina, who had a bottle of crap whiskey yet it usually was one a one-liter bottle and who was capable of making anyone drink their heads off. Obviously, she smoked more than I do and, believe you me, I really am a smoker. Nina was a diva. A diva living in an apartment, in a relatively crappy block of flats in Roosevelt Island, an island located on East River, where Nina resisted the temptation the jump off, not following the example of Paul Celan or Gherasim Luca, who took their own lives throwing themselves off into the Seine.

Everything was damp in that area, save for her apartment, crammed with magazines, you could find vey many issues of the Literary Gazette and Literary Romania. The famous Paris Match issue of 1968 could also be found there, with an article of General de Gaulle’s visit to Bucharest.”

Filmmaker Alexandru Solomon’s reminiscing Nina Cassian was also extremely emotional. During the launch event Alexandru Solomon also had a short film screened, a film he had made when he was a teenager. Captured in the shots taken in Vama Veche, there were Nina Cassian and his mother, painter and art history teacher Yvonne Hasan, together with the group of artists they were members of.