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Instead of Whom Does the Flower Bloom: The Poems of Vlado Kreslin
Vlado Kreslin and Urška Charney (Translator)
Guernica Editions, Fall 2012
80 pages
Trade Paperback
ISBN13: 9781550716368
ISBN10: 1550716360
English
Translated from the Slovenian
$12.00 Canada, $12.00 US
Read more from the Essential Translations Series
Kreslin's poetry is a beautiful aesthetic experience, evocative and subtle, particularly rich in natural imagery. There are clear themes that run like veins throughout it: the Mura River (which winds through Prekmurje), the ubiquitous storks of Prekmurje and other avian images, an appreciation for gypsy culture (particularly their musical traditions), trans-generational and trans-cultural inspiration, mist and stars. One might imagine the poems best read in the early morning hours, on the mist-spread banks of the Mura.
Under our sun this can't be done,/ It is not the way of things/ That a tree should blossom/ And grow strong into the sky.
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.
Alan Shapiro
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.
Noah Charney, author of Stealing the Mystic Lamb
Legendary...
Michael Stipe of R.E.M.
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.
Richard Flanagan, author of Gould's Book of Fish
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.
Michael Sofranko, Poet and Professor of English
Books by Vlado Kreslin
Books by Urška Charney
