SHE was pretty once, she said, with a small chin and a round nose. That changed “like an earthquake” when she was 11. Nose and chin grew like “valleys and mountains”; her face became ugly, “wounding the retinas of those who gaze on the twisted shadow I cast upon the ground”.

She feared she would die a spinster. Or just die. Her idyllic pre-war childhood, as Renée Annie Katz, the daughter of cash-strapped provincial intellectuals, ended sharply with the outbreak of war and the rise of an anti-semitic, Hitlerite regime in Romania. Like Andri, the boy fatally adopted into a Jewish family in Max Frisch’s play “Andorra”, she defiantly accepted an imposed heritage: her family’s Jewishness had been “culinary ecstasy rather than spiritual fulfilment”.


She joined the underground Communist Party during the war and married a young party member. But the romance in both unions ebbed. She had liked the party’s ideals—particularly its aversion to greed—but once in power the comrades wanted solid, uplifting, straightforward poetry, not the fantastic nonsense that this strange young woman, writing under the pen-name Nina Cassian, produced.

Her first volume of verse, “On a scale of 1 to 1”, written in the spirit of French surrealism, was blasted as decadent by official critics. Cultural commissars chided her for overuse of metaphor: how could the sea be “yellow in the twilight”, when it was obviously blue? She did her best to produce what they wanted, but she knew these rules were patronising nonsense. What could be closer to the people than her beloved Romanian folk tales, and they were full of magic and metaphor?

The jaws that bite, the claws that catch

She blossomed during the cultural thaw that followed the end of Stalinism. Now happily married to the writer Alexandru Stefanescu, her poetry (imagine Sylvia Plath crossed with Emily Dickinson, in more than 50 volumes all told) was part of a national renaissance. She composed music, illustrated books, and translated Brecht, Molière and Shakespeare into Romanian; she was particularly proud of her rendering of Lewis Carroll’s nonsense poem “Jabberwocky”, (“Bizdibocul”). Over time her poems, translated by, among others, Andrea Deletant and Brenda Walker, gained a notable following abroad.

Romania’s leader from 1965, a cobbler-turned-Communist called Nicolae Ceausescu, shook his country free of Soviet control, but built a personality cult based on a perverse mixture of nationalism and Communist dogma. From 1982 his obsessive efforts to pay off the country’s foreign debts led to humiliating austerity: grinding food shortages (even finding fish scales to boil for soup was hard), and parsimonious power supplies. Bucharest, once the Paris of Europe’s east, descended into a threadbare twilight. Stalin had been terrifying, she reckoned, but the Ceausescu regime was worse: “so perverse and surreptitious it destroyed us inside.” Criticism, within limits, was allowed, but ignored. She met him once: he shuffled his papers and looked away.

With rational syllables
I try to clear up the occult mind
and promiscuous violence.
My linguistic protest has no power
The enemy is illiterate.

But personal mockery was not allowed. When the police raided the home of her friend Gheorghe Ursu in 1985, they seized his diary, in which he had jotted down her scathing secret poems about the Conducator’s self-importance and stupidity. He was beaten to death; her own flat was raided, her possessions confiscated. Luckily, she was abroad, in New York on a Fulbright scholarship. Wisely, she stayed.

No poets leave their language or country of their own free will, she said. She missed her native tongue’s licentiousness:

...the clitoris in my throat
vibrating, sensitive, pulsating,
exploding in the orgasm of Romanian.

Like her great émigré counterparts, the Russian Joseph Brodsky and the Pole Czeslaw Milosz, she eventually began to write in English, adding poignant notes of exile to her themes of honesty, humour and eroticism. Initially she felt trapped by the strangeness of American life, especially the materialism. But in 1998 she married again, to her great happiness. She always found the American literary scene a bit odd (she wrote sardonic lines about the plonkish practice of summarising poems before reading them in public). But she pitched in gladly, adding her voice to a campaign for politeness on the subway.

I stood during the entire journey:
nobody offered me a seat
although I was at least a hundred years older than anyone else on board,
although the signs of least three serious afflictions were visible on me:
Pride, Loneliness, and Art.

She felt unwelcome in post-revolutionary Romania: censorship ended after 1989, but censoriousness was rife. People said her life under communism had been too privileged, and she had run away to the West, escaping the regime’s worst, final years. She was unbothered: everyone makes mistakes, she said. You just had to be honest about them.