Nina Cassian’s Spargan – A linguistic perspective

In the centennial year since Nina Cassian's birth and a decade after her passing, this article delves into her Spargan poems. Drawing comparisons with well-established nonsense verse traditions, this article argues that Spargan is not a constructed language but rather a variety of Romanian-sounding speech. While Spargan poems maintain Romanian prosody and syntactic structures, they intentionally lack semantic content. However, Cassian's careful manipulation of language demonstrates her linguistic creativity. By exploring the boundary between language and nonsense, this research contributes to a deeper understanding of Cassian's literary experimentation and her contribution to the tradition of poetic playfulness in Romanian literature.

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