SOURCE: An introduction to Call Yourself Alive?: Love Poems of Nina Cassian, Forest Books, 1988, pp. vii-ix.

In the following introduction to Call Yourself Alive?, Adcock praises the physicality of Cassian's poems. Adcock also notes that while the translations are very good, they cannot quite convey Cassian's "expertise in the more subtle and flexible rhythms of spoken language" that the original poems display.

Nina Cassian is a notable phenomenon in Romanian literature: a poet remarkable for the vigour, the sensuality and indeed the savagery of her work, but also an intellectual, a critic, a journalist, and a writer of fiction and of books for children. Side by side with this prolific literary career she has also had a parallel career as a composer, with a sideline in book illustration. But it is as a poet that she is best known, with an established international reputation. She has been publishing...