Remembering Nina Cassian

The news that Gabriel Garcia Marquez died on April 17^th has overwhelmed the news—even for those who are likely to know—that another amazing literary figure died only 2 days before: Nina Cassian.  Nina Cassian was the pen name for the Romanian poet born as Renée Annie Katz.  Cassian’s biography is the stuff of Nobel Prize winners, like that of Joseph Brodsky or Czelsaw Milosz.  She grew up primarily in Bucharest, where her family relocated when she was eleven.  Her first collection of poetry was condemned by the Communist authorities.  For a time Cassian tailored her writing to be less controversial, but she was an exuberant personality and secretly wrote satires of the government during the oppressive Ceausescu regime.  In 1985, Cassian was invited to teach at New York University.  While here, her friend, Gheorghe Ursu, was arrested and tortured to death.  The authorities found Ursu’s journals in which he also transcribed Cassian’s unpublished poems lampooning the government.  This resulted in Cassian’s home being seized by the authorities and all her books and papers being confiscated.  Realizing that her life would be in danger if she returned, Cassian appealed to the US Government for asylum and, having it granted, remained here until her death on April 15, 2014.  

I had the good fortune to meet Cassian in the early 90’s.  I was introduced to her by poet Dana Gioia at a reading she was giving in SoHo.  She had a magnificent presence: elegant in the way we think of great Hollywood actresses.  I can still hear her voice in my head, for the way she delivered a line was indelible, as was the power of her poetry, which is really the focus here.  

Cassian was incredibly prolific, publishing over 50 books in her lifetime: poetry, children’s books, fiction, translations, even puppet plays.  She had a playful imagination but also a big heart.  This may account for her poetry being something like surreal love poetry.  But don’t think of her as another Pablo Neruda; her poetry is quite different.  The playfulness of Cassian also accounts for her prolific publication of children’s books, which in turn might give you an inkling of her surreal bent.  Think of fables and fairytales, but those which don’t shy away from the darkness.  For instance her poem “Sand,” 

My hands creep forward on the hot sand
to unknown destinations;

perhaps to the shoreline,

perhaps to the arms from which they are severed

and which lie on the beach

like two decapitated eels.

(translated by Naomi Lazard)

 

What is remarkable about so much of Cassian’s poetry is that the majority of it seems to lose nothing in translation.  For instance, in the marvelous poem, “Orchestra,” the ethereal quality of the beloved is likened to the elusive emotional force of music as it is played.  Even in English that pursuit of an impossible spirit is perfectly rendered:

 

Climbing the scales three octaves at a time,

I search for you among the high notes where

the tender flute resides.  But where are your

sweet eyelashes?  Not there.

 

Then I descend among the sunlit brasses—

there funnels glistening like fountain tips.

I let them splash me with their streaming gold,

but I can’t find your lips.

 

Then daring ever deeper I explore

the depths the elemental strings command.

Their bows will not create a miracle

without your stroking hand.

 

The orchestra is still.  The score is blank.

Cold as a slide rule the brasses, strings and flute.

Sonorous lover, when will you return?

The orchestra is mute?

(translated by Dana Gioia)

 

At times she rendered with perhaps greater clarity than other more celebrated poets the problem of art under tyrannical regimes.  Though one could also see it as a kind of pride, it is a pride born of necessity in the face of oppression:

 

Vowel

 

A clean vowel

is my morning,

Latin pronunciation

in the murmur of confused time.

With rational syllables

I’m trying to clear the occult mind

and promiscuous violence.

My linguistic protest

has no power.

The enemy is illiterate.

(translated by Brenda Walker and Andrea Deletant)

 

For Cassian, language is sensuous and even sexual.  Reading her poetry one is more inclined to think of poetry as a kind of dance, the movement of a body.

 

Licentiousness

 

Letters fall from my words

as teeth might fall from my mouth.

Lisping?  Stammering?  Mumbling?

Or the last silence?

Please God take pity

on the roof of my mouth,

on my tongue,

on my glottis,

on the clitoris in my throat

vibrating, sensitive, pulsating,

exploding in the orgasm of Romanian.

(translated by Brenda Walker and Andrea Deletant)

 

Clearly that appeal to God also shows a keen awareness of the danger involved, that one is not only exposed to the single lover as a poet but to the authorities who are in power.  If poetry is a form of lovemaking, it is, once published, also public and, therefore, a terrible kind of vulnerability.  This may also account for why the majority of her poetry is love poetry.  But also Cassian is masterful in her embrace of being fully human.  That may be the core of her poetry.

 

Her face was striking with its prominent chin and aquiline nose.  And so she made these powerful features the point of her poem “Self-Portrait.”  Perhaps few poems so well exemplify her desire to fully embrace the great range of our humanity.  Pointing out the oddities of her own face, plunging into them, and insisting on them even as others might mock them, results in an enlargement of what we call “human” as so much of her poetry does:

 

I was given at birth this odd triangular

face, the sugared cone that you see now,

the figurehead jutting from some pirate prow,

framed by trailing strands of moonlike hair.

 

Disjoined shape I’m destined to carry around

and thrust out steadily through endless days,

wounding the retinas of those who gaze

on the twisted shadow I cast upon the ground.

 

Disowned by the family from which I came,

who am I?  Earth conspires to turn me back,

the white race and the yellow, the redskin and the black,

till even to the species I lay little claim.

 

And only when—a self-inflicted woman—

I cry out; only when I face the cold;

and only when by time I’m stained and soiled

do they find me beautiful: and call me human.



Click image to order from Amazon

 

Enrique Lihn: Charting the Voids

Click image to go to Amazon.com
to order. 

One of the great pleasures in reading is discovering writers one never read.  A good friend sent me an article on the richness of Chile’s poetic landscape and based on that article I purchased Figures of Speech, a selection of poems by poet Enrique Lihn.  Lihn was born in Santiago in 1929.  Though he was very prolific as a poet, playwright, essayist, novelist and short story writer, and I read that several volumes of his work have been translated into English, those translations seem very scarce.  Scanning through an Amazon search, only 2 of the 4 English translations that came up were readily available.

To say anything about a poet one reads in translation is sketchy.  But there are things one can say and things worth saying.  The overall arc of his style still carries through, I’m sure, and what marks it out is how it builds on voids and absences.  The significance of his topics emerges from the accumulation of what remains unsaid about them, or rather what he says around them.  It may be a consequence of his persistent concern for the limitations of language.  Like other poets who take up language and it limitations as a subject, a poet like George Oppen, Lihn is somewhat experimental in his approach, though not so syntactically complex as Oppen.  For Lihn “style sure isn’t the man/but a summary of all his uncertainties.”  Uncertainties accumulate in Lihn’s sparsely punctuated poems in an attempt, it seems, to create a context for those uncertainties, a kind of linguistic net.

When he traveled the United States and Canada, his observations always picked out the odd and alienated, the homeless who were rendered otherworldly by the extremity of their destitute living.  The genderless “Brooklyn Monster,” the woman in Toronto who stared at the dying youth with her eyes of snow.  Lihn sees these homeless people not as mere figures of economic failure but as something of the repressed specters of our society’s apparent success.  As he says elsewhere, “we’re overrun by inhuman times.” 

In another place he says, “all our ways of meaning things are contaminated.”  Thus the darker sides of our society are closest to purity, or at least, to accuracy in depicting the soul of our society.  In the poem “The Age of Data,” he puts his finger on the spiritual failure of mid-to-late 20^th century thinking: the failure of pure analysis, our god of information, for

Instead of joining, we separate

Separation and information are confounded
and data is just the opposite of God.

It’s no wonder that his poems have the force of a Prokofiev sonata and the power of a Turner painting.  Their ability to suggest or conjure an impression are what stir the deepest response and engage the harshest emotions, much as the way Robert Lowell’s best poems do with their images and tone.  This is a rather strange thing considering that Lihn first attempted to be a painter in college, but after turning to writing he produced, instead of a poetry of dense meticulous imagery, a poetry of limpid images that disclose a depth of subtler thematic implications.  So his poem on Turner concludes with something that might describe his poetics,

the moment that consumes the substance

and leaves only the embers of Being
that conflagration that comes from clouds and wind
and burns—spread out on the waters—its image.

 

Lihn is always at the end of the world, always looking over the cliff into what is not possible and defining the edge of that cliff.  “Life, beauty, is like this; or to put it a better way is unthinkable/a mirage one cannot stop thinking of.”  This is a dangerous terrain to chart, for at the linguistic edge all other edges converge—historical, philosophical, religious—and so even if he doesn’t occasionally fall into a cliché, he does sometimes dance around a truism.  But it is worth exploring the boundaries between “Art and Life,” old world and new world, nature and art, life and death. 

In the last weeks of Lihn’s life, he composed poems confronting the impossible enigma of death in the most personal terms.  These are possibly the least interesting poems of the collection as they court those truisms more often than elsewhere.  But they have their moments.  Certainly, facing the end, he is looking farther into those dark places, those voids to discover the defining spaces around them.  For him, his poetry had become

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .death,

the dream of writing where all discomfort has its place

the prison of your being that deprived you of the other name of love

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . written silently upon the wall.

In his final weeks—dying just months shy of his 60^th birthday in 1988—Lihn writing, revising, even correcting proofs of his final collection the night before his death, he was connecting the limitations of the self with the limitations of language and life.  These final poems seem less elaborate, sometimes pointed and powerful, at others not fully engaged.  Yet they mark the closer of a life devoted to poetry.  If art imitates life and we are “works of art momentarily alive,” there is in connecting the limitations of life and language an insight into the nature of the self, the constructed ego and how its grammar breaks down at the edges or in the face of what is hard or impossible to define.  Perhaps lying in bed he realized

Facing death he resists the giving in

even though touched by it he’s a shadow
but a shadow of something, clinging
to the imitation of life.

His life had become a work of art, a painted representation of the patterns he had followed, sketched into his poems and other writings.  Of course, this calls to mind Wallace Stevens who traced a similar trajectory in the imagination.  Certainly, Lihn stakes as much in the imagination as Stevens, though with less insistence.  Lihn also had the grit of the quotidian in his poetry, the hard, troubled reality that life in a politically volatile place as Chile would produce in others of his generation.  His voice never stops insisting on the negative spaces that define the apparent truth; much like a Taoist insists there is no mountain without a valley.