Nina Cassian

Who was Nina Cassian?

Nina Cassian was a Romanian poet, translator, journalist and film critic.

She rendered into Romanian the works of William Shakespeare, Bertolt Brecht, Christian Morgenstern, Yiannis Ritsos, and Paul Celan. She has published more than fifty books of her own poetry.

Born into a Jewish family in Galaţi, they lived in Brașov between 1926 and 1935. In 1935, the family moved to Bucharest, where she went to high school. She took drawing lessons with George Loewendal and M. H. Maxy, acting lessons with Beate Fredanov and Alexandru Finți, piano and musical composition lessons with Theodor Fuchs, Paul Jelescu, Mihail Jora and Constantin Silvestri.

In 1944 she entered the Literature Department of Bucharest University, but abandoned her studies after one year.

She published her first poem, Am fost un poet decadent in the daily România liberă in 1945, and her first poetry collection, La scara 1/1 in 1947. It was labeled "decadent poetry" in a Scînteia article in 1948. Scared by that fierce criticism, she then turned to writing in the proletkult and socialist-realistic fashion. This phase lasted for about eight years.