Nina Cassian (Renee Annie Cassian)

(b. 27 November 1924, Galati)

Poet, novelist, translator , composer , exile and expatriate living in New York since 1985

Selected Quotations

On Being Excluded:
They don't want me there, I'm not sure why. They used to consider me eccentric and rebellious...But now maybe it's because they resent that I'm living a better life in America.

Biography (Excerpt)

Nina Cassian is a personality of many facets and the contradictions of her life reflect, in a way, the tragedy of many Romanian intellectuals whose careers took off before WWII and subsequently had to adapt in order to survive, some of them more zealously than others. Nina Cassian falls into the latter category. For the generation that grew up immediately after WWII in communist Romania, Cassian’s poems were the staple diet of the Marxist textbooks – of ‘approved’ literature.