The deeply affecting, magical poems of `Life Sentence' come to us through vivid translations made by twenty poets, including such distinguished British and American poets as Fleur Adcock, Dana Gioia, Carolyn Kizer, William Jay Smith and Richard Wilbur. Nina Cassian had been a leading literary figure in Romania for more than 40 years when, during a visit to New York in 1985, her satires of the Ceausescu regime were discovered copied into a friend's diary. The friend was tortured to death, while Cassian's house was ransacked by the authorities and her publications banned.
