Guernica Editions

Legendary...

Marvelous ... [Kreslin provides] a magic fusion of so many Mitteleuropean motifs that put me in mind of everything from the films of Emir Kusturica to the novels of Bohumil Hrabal ... [Kreslin is] of such standing that everyone who comes to central Europe, from Dylan to R.E.M., plays with him ... So much great modern art and writing has risen out of the polyglot world of central Europe ... I realize that Kreslin's music is entirely of his own world, and yet enlarged that world to include anyone who wished to be a part of it.

Vlado Kreslin's Instead of Whom Does the Flower Bloom is a lyrical experience of beauty and longing. His moving and memorable poems remind us that we are all exiles, populated by fragments and longing for connection. An attentive, quiet mixture of the political and the personal, Kreslin's work summons the ghosts of all that has disappeared from our lives, and thus reminds us how the imagery remaining after those disappearances potently guides our memory and our history. How fortunate that Instead of Whom Does the Flower Bloom, artfully translated by Urška Charney, is now available to English speaking audiences.

Kreslin is the Bob Dylan of the Balkans, a poet/troubadour of a lost Europe whose poetry, beautifully translated here into English for the first time, evokes a gorgeous and shadow-covered corner of Europe.

Vlado Kreslin will be a revelation to North American readers. His poems seem at one and the same time postmodern and pre-modern. They evoke the lost world of a resilient people in a language that resonates in its plain-spokenness with the losses that all thoughtful people in a globalized economy confront. Don't let the ostensibly un-ironic, even folksy language fool you--his poems slyly combine simplicity of means with complexity of effect, a combination only an artist of great sophistication can pull off. Urska Charney's translations honor both aspects of Kreslin's style. Kreslin is lucky to have found such a sensitive and canny translator. And so are we.