Nina Cassian

Life Sentence

Edited and with an Introduction by William Jay Smith

"Nina Cassian strikes me as one of the best poets alive who, through an accident of history, finds herself cut off from her native language and in a country where her work is mainly unknown. . . . She is in the same position in which Brodsky and Milosz once found themselves and what I know of her work suggests it is of a similar quality."—Howard Moss

"The selected poems of Nina Cassian represent an exciting collaboration of poet-translators and the poet herself. Comedy and despair come together in this lyrical text; the whole is enhanced by William Jay Smith's useful and insightful introduction."—Maxine Kumin

"Nina Cassian is a world-class poet, high-spirited, fierce, intelligent, uncompromising, and wonderfully nervy. How lucky she was to get out of Romania with her skin and her pride, if with little else! And I suppose she was doubly lucky to find poets here who could translate her work into English so well that it doesn't smell of translation at all. But in truth her poems are so finely articulated that they have a built-in capacity to survive the process of conversion into another language. Nina Cassian is a writer at the peak of her power."—Stanley Kunitz

"Nina Cassian's Life Sentence is an absorbing book. Extraordinarily fresh and immediate, the poems dazzle with their colors, their depth of emotion and their originality."—Josephine Jacobson