[In this excerpt, Hunting investigates and applauds the energy and techniques in Life Sentence.]

Tietjens, Monroe, Bullis, Bollingen, Loines, Shelley, Crane, Lilly—what a long train of prizes and awards for the engine of poetry to pull! During a distinguished career, Mona Van Duyn has won them all. As well, she is a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters and a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. Then there are the fellowships and the honorary degrees…. A very long train indeed, traveling a steady track through a reliable landscape. For thirty years we have been privileged to watch its progress.

Now, rushing from another horizon, around a curve of history, suddenly appears on a quite different track a locomotive so powerful, so sweeping in speed and force, as to remind one of an iron Pegasus, pulling along with seeming effortlessness a train of assorted brightly painted and loosely coupled cars. Whereas its American counterpart travels through level heartlands, this exotic manifestation seems to have in the eye of its headlight the reflection of a landscape of violent juxtapositions, forests, rivers, mountains, steppes impinging on and jostling one another. Such is the impression made by the poetry of Nina Cassian, for over forty years a leading literary figure of Romania with an increasing reputation in Europe and in parts of the English-speaking world.

Their age is very nearly the only thing these two poets have in common; the other is, of course, their sex. Van Duyn was born in Waterloo, Iowa, in 1921, Cassian in Galati, a city on the Danube, in 1924. Van Duyn has published seven volumes of poetry, of which Near Changes is the most recent; save for criticism and reviews, all of her published work is poetry. For twenty years she served as editor, with her husband, Jarvis Thurston, of Perspective: A Quarterly of Literature, the magazine they founded in 1947. Cassian has published more than fifty books, including works of fiction and books and puppet plays for children; Life Sentence: Selected Poems is the first major collection of her poetry to appear in America, although a few translations have been published through the valiant small press. The translations in the present volume have been made by American poets, some of whom worked directly with her, and by the poet herself. Cassian is also a composer of music, and has been a journalist, film critic, and translator of, among others, Shakespeare, Brecht, Mayakovsky, and Molière.

To attempt to balance without falsely reconciling two such disparate poets and their offerings of works and days would seem a daunting, even a misguided task. Better, perhaps, to begin with distinctions of a general nature than with particulars of sought similarity. For example, there are words—and there is language. There are poems—and there is poetry. Between these two poets, there is much to choose.

Whereas Van Duyn's poems move mainly on a horizontal plane, their internal emotional fuel augmented by injections of energy from outside intellectual and historical sources, Nina Cassian's poems in Life Sentence go up like rockets to flower and burst in showers of sparks against a universal night sky. Sent up from blood-soaked earth like signals of transcendence into poetry's pure atmosphere, they are fueled by the pulse of a single human heart compelled by love of it to celebrate a tragic world.

First, then, momentum. Second, variety. Cassian's subjects occur at any and every instant of her terrifically aware existence, as these randomly chosen opening lines attest: "The lighthouse there at Cape Crepuscular / sends out signals: the weather is getting rough" (from "The Troubled Bay"); "The orbit I describe in my environment, / cautiously, so as not to strike birds with my forehead" (from "Orbits"); "I wake up and say: I'm through" (from "Morning Exercises"); "The word was uttered: let us break its neck" (from "Game Mistress")—open Life Sentence anywhere and electrifying images coruscate on the page. Not that the poems are all whoosh and glitter. Many are so quiet that the breaking of a heart may be heard:

Ready for goodbye, although the moon is rising.
Ready for goodbye, although the tea is boiling.
Ready for goodbye, although the wind is pouring
its triumphant notes into the air.
Ready for goodbye, although my sister's mother
carries in her womb a lovely daughter.
Ready for goodbye.
("Ready for Goodbye," trans. William Jay Smith)

But always they breathe out the sense of an ascending spirit.

Although her poetry has certain affinities with that of Rilke, for example, or of Milosz, and shares their heritage of European Romanticism, it is more transparent in texture than Rilke's, which can become opalescent at the edges, and generally less spacious in contour than Milosz's. And although her antecedents include the French Symbolists who, as William Jay Smith points out in his graceful and erudite Introduction to this selection, influenced Eliot and Pound, she is preeminently herself—not her "own person," as current jargon has it, but her self, Cassian, for poetry as a bird is for the sky.

Van Duyn has a strong sense of the poem as incentive: By molding her experiences into art and offering the poem as a "valentine" to her audience ("the world"), she may cause its members to look at their own experiences in a new way and, perhaps, to act on their findings. "This effort," she has remarked, "assumes a caring about other human beings, a caring which is a form of love." ["Mona Van Duyn," CA Interview, by Jean W. Ross, Contemporary Authors, New Revision Series, volume 7 (1982), pp. 505-7]. Hence her predilection for multiple examples and rhetorical figurations: They are, in effect, teaching devices. Cassian would agree that the business of poetry is "to put order in the chaos of appearances," but her ideas on the nature of poetry differ from Van Duyn's in that she sees the poem not as illustrative or conversionary means but as a form of life itself: "Poetry is not to transcend life or to transform it, but it is life. It doesn't change its structure of being alive, of being organic. Art is as alive as an animal" [Nina Cassian, Interview by Ricia Gordon, transcript, 1987]. To Cassian, poetry has a listening ear.

If art is "as alive as an animal," Cassian is not out to capture it but to release it from its cage of propriety. Freed, it assumes protean shapes. Metaphor becomes metamorphosis:

My hands creep forward on the hot sand
to unknown destinations;
perhaps to the shoreline,
perhaps to the arms from which they were severed
and which lie on the beach
like two decapitated eels.
("Sands," trans. Naomi Lazard)

Surrealistic, yes; but note the viewpoint, which never deviates from beach level and thus provides stability, so that the poem may "creep forward" with the bodiless "hands" towards the culminating transformation of the shocking final image. Yet the image as image is not final, but goes on replicating itself in the reader's consciousness. Agreed, we say, that hands would wish to rejoin their arms; agreed, that arms without hands might resemble eels. If hands join arms, do hands become the equivalent of heads? For these are "decapitated" eels. If arms have heads, then arms, the bodies of eels, are comparable to human trunks. Are hands, then, the equivalent of intelligence? More than that, for hands also "feel." Hands "think," besides, through touch. So the reader continues, after the poem has left the page, simultaneously thinking and feeling toward it, feeling the exhilaration of thought. As the internal configurations of the poem alter, its observer and companion is changed as well, becoming not only witness to but in his own way participant in the pageant of mutability.

A less violent, ultimately more playful metamorphosis occurs in "The Couple," in which Cassian seems to be setting out to describe a pair of swans:

Necks crossed, then parallel,
they float in slow motion
white and hazel
mingling their blond contrasts,
their floating heads
watching the world from lunar heights,
their fragile legs like antennae,
the bones of their foreheads
breathing sadness and exile …

Of course there are clues: "lunar heights," "fragile legs." But so persuasive are such phrases as "they float in slow motion," "floating heads," and that first color adjective "white" that the reader persists in his initial avian impression; furthermore, if he's read Yeats, "sadness and exile" carry irresistible echoes of "The Wild Swans at Coole." And Cassian allows his persistence to continue:

… as they circle in their dismal arena,
straining upward to escape
as if pulled by invisible leashes
in love with their heads
but hating their captive bodies.
They separate, they follow
like the languid hours

of the final days
of an extinct species—

We have taken in the details Cassian has given, we have experienced the motion of the lines, and we see nothing, or almost nothing, but swans, floating on a round pond ("their dismal arena" may be weedy) in the dream of a picture. Then Cassian, in Christopher Hewitt's translation, gives us her final word: "… giraffes!" In turning birds into animals, Cassian astonishes not the poem, but us. The exclamation point is for us: how blind, how gullible, we are! how limited our notions have been! If not swans, then giraffes, Cassian seems to say; or, swans and giraffes. Nothing could be simpler, once we have been shown. After all, do we not mingle Linnaean sub-kingdoms?

What might be called the principle of metamorphosis is found throughout Life Sentence. In the long poem "Cold," for example, the title quality is made masculine: "He's immutable, self-centered, he doesn't communicate," while "convention," common courtesy, is assigned the feminine gender: "she is the one who asks for our handshake, / for uttering 'good day' and 'good night.'" In "Kisses," the "hundreds, thousands" of these become, with a swiftness that defies ordinary logic, "my fruits, squirrels, carnations, / rivers—my knives!" Yet never does the reader feel the associations to be random; rather, his sense is that each has a history within the situation being so rapidly delineated. In "Postmeridian," the inaction of waiting without anticipation "expands chairs, / flattens the telephone," changes the attributes of physical objects. It is not amorphousness of images that Cassian explores and emphasizes, but coherence of all things animate and inanimate. As she asks in "Cold," "[W]ho could name the place where something begins to change?"

"Part of a Bird," a long, sustained, ecstatic flight of a poem, is perhaps the best exemplar of Cassian's technique of transformation through continual shifts of immediate sensory perception; the poem's off and flying from its title on to its last, questioning line. So pulsing is Cassian's memory of childhood that "Even now my breast bone's aching / when I remember how I was running / because the smell of petunias invaded everything." The poem is in seven unnumbered sections, four long and three successively shorter, the last consisting of a single question. The four long sections contain two or three sentences each, sentences which in their swift spiraling out, their enjambments, and their fairly sparse but natural use of "and" as joiner and leader at once, are only lightly stopped before taking off again—the effect of the punctuation mark being more a dip in flight than a landing. As the sections become briefer, the mind of the poem appears to slow, its words to become more hesitant: "And after that … / What was I saying?"; "And after that … / —Where was I?" Ellipses are introduced to suggest uncertainty; the vehicle loses altitude, yaws slightly, seems unsure of that destination toward which it has until now been speeding with such assurance. But with the last repetition of "And after that," phrased not as an expression of hesitation but as a question which invites more experience, the poem swoops upward with a fresh vigor: "And after that?" The translators, Brenda Walker and Andrea Deletant, seem to have followed Cassian's original with rapt scrupulousness. The result is that "Part of a Bird" is, even in translation, virtuosic in all respects, not least in its syntactical brilliance.

In fact, Cassian seems to have inspired in all of her translators here the passionate respect that poets give to a superlative practitioner of their shared art. Thus they are able to approach her work with their own best strengths. Poets will often turn to translating as a spur to or refreshment of their own work; the translators of Life Sentence, however, uniformly show unusual devotion to revealing and illuminating the unique forces which propel Cassian's living forms. Although some of the poems initially chosen to be presented in this selection had to be omitted because, as Smith has it in his Introduction, "the resonance and the allusions of the originalfs] could not be carried over" into English, the recognition of these difficulties speaks excellently for the sensitivity of editor and translators alike. Smith goes on to report that Cassian, herself a translator of note, "has permitted, and even encouraged, her translators to take considerable liberty as long as they did not violate the spirit of her work." Thus such interpreters as Richard Wilbur and Dana Gioia have been able to keep their translations in strict accordance with Cassian's rhyme schemes, others have been able to approximate them, and still others have elected to emphasize meaning rather than arrangement. The list of translators is also a list of distinguished American poets, among them Stanley Kunitz, Ruth Whitman, and Carolyn Kizer; by investing their own talents in Life Sentence, they have produced a treasure. As Cassian has said elsewhere concerning what may be lost in translations of her poems, "I'm not limited to my own music…. I'm open to all the tunes in the world" [Interview by Ricia Gordon, transcript, 1987].

Can we draw these two disparate poets closer together by speaking of exile? It is easy, perhaps too easy, to say that all poets, all artists, are in some way exiles, outsiders by temperament, choice, or happenstance. Cassian is, of course, a literal exile, her house in Bucharest emptied and sealed, her name written out of her country's literature. She lives now in New York City; in Romania, Nina Cassian does not exist.

On the surface, Mona Van Duyn's life would seem to admit of none of the exigencies of exile. Longtime residence in St. Louis, Missouri; longtime academic surroundings; consistent, cumulative progress of poetic career. One has the sense, with this American poet, of hardwon and possibly rueful wisdom. Exile of a non-literal sort may occur within safety. There is something appealing in Van Duyn's assessment of her professional achievement: "I've just tried to write the way I thought was best and the way I could write" ["Mona Van Duyn," CA Interview, by Jean W. Ross, Contemporary Authors, New Revision Series, vol. 7 (1982), pp. 505-07].

At this chronologically similar stage of their work, both poets have a keen perception of their relationship to time. Van Duyn feels that "the ideas have become so scarce, so few and far between these last few years." Cassian observes, "You need some detachment and time to look and consider what really happened. If you are under pressure you are a slave of what's happening; you are not the master" [Interview by Ricia Gordon, transcript, 1987]. Even an instant requires time; even revelation requires mastery. For a poet there are many methods of transport. In her poem "The Troubled Bay," Nina Cassian writes:

I knew, as I swam at length far out from shore,
thinking of poets and so much in their debt,
having absorbed a hundred poems or more,
I'd have to write, or drown in one, myself.

It is, indeed, a life sentence.