TEHRAN – “Life Sentence: Selected Poems” by Romanian writer Nina Cassian has come to Iranian bookstores.

Originally published in 1990, the collection has been translated into Persian by Sanam Vefqi-Mojarrad. Saless is the publisher of the book.

Often edged with gallows humor, the poems deal with childhood, color, censorship, freedom, greed, loneliness, love, pain and mortality.

The book was acclaimed by the author’s contemporaries worldwide.  

“The selected poems of Nina Cassian represent an exciting collaboration of poet-translators and the poet herself,” American poet Maxine Kumin said.

“Comedy and despair come together in this lyrical text; the whole is enhanced by William Jay Smith’s useful and insightful introduction,” she added.

“Nina Cassian strikes me as one of the best poets alive,” said American poet Howard Moss, while for Stanley Kunitz, another American poet, she “is a world-class poet, high-spirited, fierce, intelligent, uncompromising and wonderfully nervy.” 

Cassian had been a leading literary figure in Romania for over forty years when, during a visit to New York in 1985, her satires of the Ceausescu regime were discovered and copied into a friend’s diary. 

The friend was tortured to death, while Cassian’s house was ransacked by the authorities and her publications were banned.

Cassian’s irrepressible voice has outlasted the Romanian dictatorship. The deeply affecting, magical poems of “Life Sentence”, a selection spanning forty-five years, have been translated by a number of distinguished poets, including Richard Wilbur, Carolyn Kizer, William Jay Smith and Fleur Adcock. 

Photo: Front cover of the Persian edition of Nina Cassian’s poem book “Life Sentence”.

MMS/YAW