2022
Aplauze pentru poet • Ion Minulescu
Poezii: “Epilog sentimental”, “Ultima oră”, “Romanța tineretii”, “Ploaia Sfântului Ilie”, “Acuarela”, “Peisaj umed”, “Cântecul nebunului”, “Păpuşa automată”, “Celei care pleaca”, “Romanța celor 3 romanțe”, “Romanța retrospectiva”, “Romanța meschină”, “Sinuciderea unui anonim”, “Fetiţa din Făgădău”
Recită actorii Victor Rebengiuc, Rodica Mandache, Mihai Mălaimare
Filmări realizate în noiembrie 2021, la Sala ArCuB Bucureşti
Nina Cassian
b. 27 November 1924, Galați – d. 14 April 2014, New York
poet, essayist, translator
Nina Cassian studied at the Pompilian Institute in Bucharest and frequented left-wing intellectual circles. Tudor Arghezi and Ion Barbu were vocal in their encouragement of her first forays into literature.
In 1947-48, she was an editor for Rampa magazine, and from 1949, for Urzica (The Nettle), a humorous and satirical magazine, while also teaching at the Mihai Eminescu School of Literature and Literary Criticism.
In 1947, she published her first collection of poems, the surrealist On a Scale of 1:1. After an ideological attack against her in The Spark, the Communist Party mouthpiece, she gradually shifted to writing socialist realist poetry. ‘After a detour of around eight years,’ as she herself called it, marked by naïve ideological enthusiasm and compromises, from 1956 she went back to writing authentic poetry. At the same time, she began writing for children, drawn by the aesthetic potential of imaginative escape and candour. She also published two collections of first-person ‘subjective prose.’ All in all, she published fifty books of poetry, essays, and prose, inventing a new poetic idiom, ‘broke language.’ In 1969, she was awarded the Prize of the Romanian Writers Union.
In 1985, Nina Cassian was awarded a scholarship by the Open Society Foundation and left the country to teach a poetry class at New York University, to which she would later donate a part of her manuscripts. After the semester, she requested political asylum.
The collection Call Yourself Alive was published in Britain and the collection Life Sentence in the United States, which were translations of books previously published in Romania, as well as Take My Word for It, Blue Apple and Lady of Miracles, which featured work previously unpublished in Romanian.
Nina Cassian lived in New York for the last thirty years of her life, and ‘the major project of [her] old age and [her] life’ was her memoirs, a mirror of ‘years stolen and given,’ a project whose first two volumes, entitled Memory as Dowry, gained critical acclaim in Romania. In 1994, she received the New York Public Library’s Literary Lion award. In 2005, she launched the third volume of Memory as Dowry at the Romanian Cultural Institute in New York. In the United States, her Selected Works were published by Norton, a remarkable achievement for a poet from Eastern Europe.
Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, New England Review and American Poetry Review.
Nina Cassian was a voluble poet, capable of taking any stylistic direction when the moment suited her. She was drawn to every possible genre and format. She wrote prose that was both critically and popular with readers.
