Hello, I'm Krestey Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 1999, and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is a poet, born brought up and persecuted in Romania,

her life reflects her homeland's frightening uncertainties.

An idyllic childhood on the banks of the Danube led to the Bucharest

pogrom, the terrors of the Stalinist era, and in the 1970s the cruel and

absurd regime of Chausescu. Throughout this time she wrote, she's published more than 50 books,

fantasy, satires, poems and written music.

And then 13 years ago on a visit to America she was forbidden to return home. In exile, her mastery of the English

language and her ability to translate the spirit of her homeland have made her a passionate

and lively literary figure.

Poets, she says, never leave country, territory or language of their own free will,

but I had no choice.

She is Nina Cassian.

You certainly had no choice.

You were declared a non-person overnight. You were just written out of everything in

your homeland. That must have been a paralyzing experience actually I

went to America to teach a course of creative writing at New York University.

And it's during that period of three months

that I found out that my friend,

Georgie Ursu, who was an engineer

and also a poet who kept a diary for 40 years. I don't know how many

...