Take My Word for It

by Nina Cassian

Overview

A long-awaited collection—her first written in English—by Romania's leading literary figure for over fifty years, and one of the world's most important voices.

Ars Poetica: a Polemic

I am I.
I am personal.
I am subjective, intimate, private,
particular,
confessional.
All that happens,
happens to me.
The landscape I describe
is myself. . . .
If you're interested
in birds, trees, rivers,
try reference books.
Don't read my poems.
I'm no indexed bird,
tree or river,
just a registered Self.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393342055
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	07/17/1998
Pages:	96
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 8.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Nina Cassian (1924—2014) was born in Galati, Romania. A composer, journalist, film critic, and translator of Shakespeare and Brecht, Cassian was exiled from Romania in 1985.

Editorial Reviews

"A writer at the peak of her power."

Stanley Kunitz

A famous Romanian literary figure, Cassian came to the United States in 1985 and now lives on Rooselvelt Island in New York. Shakespeare's Ariel could be the speaker of this "protean," tender work, Cassian's first collection of poems written in English (or which she herself translated). "Indulging in the magical alcohol of words," Cassian turns idiomatic language on its head to depict landscapes where the banal is transformed into whimsical uncertainty. "Bazdabocul" is her translation of Lewis Carroll's "Jabberwocky" into Romanian, while "Imprecation" is written in a mischievous language, Spargan, that she invented. For Cassian, words have manifold associations that point the way to improbable truth in "a swarming, flexible, frantic world." ("Is `perfunctory' the dining room/ of an abbey?" she asks.) This complex, gifted 73-year-old with a child's heart maintains "a multiple embrace" of beautiful, difficult mysteries of human flesh. Ideal poetry for old and young alike.--Frank Allen, North Hampton Community Coll., Tannersville, PA

Library Journal

Like Joseph Brodsky and Czeslaw Milosz before her, Cassian, who achieved prominence in her native Romanian, has now written her first poems in English, and the result is a mixed delight: playful and nonsensical, drunk with þthe magic alcohol of words,þ Cassian includes too many bits of pure whimsy, hermetic and trivial little poems that deliberately avoid meaning. At best, her deliriously surreal verse captures the spirit of Lear, Lewis Carroll, and Ogden Nash, full of trippy puns and tonic sonorities that test the limits of language. She invents a pure sound language (þSpargaþ) in which she writes þFour Bilingual Untranslatable Poems,þ each a Poundian tone poem articulated by a tongue forked with þbilingual hissing.þ Everywhere the anarchic Cassian implores us to þget dizzy/ on the fragranceþ of her flesh. And her poems are full of sensuous detail: in þIndigo,þ she immerses herself in color; in þRemember,þ sheþs buried alive by a loverþs body; and in þSinging and Barking,þ she attests to another loverþs expertise at þbreast lifting.þ Bemoaning old age, she also chronicles þthe heydayþ of her þdecline,þ apologizing for the excesses of this volume. A Nash-like ditty, þHypothesis,þ explores the most basic rhymes, and þYucatanþ riffs on its title. Cassianþs hard- earned celebration of herself records her herculean struggle with English, with its misleading sounds and woozy syntax. Cassianþs best poems recall the wild language lessons of her fellow Romanianþs play, The Bald Soprano, which is nomean accomplishment for a first volume in English.

Kirkus Reviews