How the hometown of the great Rembrandt was turned into a giant book in different languages

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

The Dutch city of Leiden is known as the birthplace of many scientists and the great painter Rembrandt was born. It seemed that the city was destined to live long ago by its past glory, but in the nineties, two residents made it one of the centers of modern culture, literally turning it into a giant book. They began to write poetry on the walls of the city. The first was a poem by Marina Tsvetaeva.

Although the project of Ben Valenkamp and Ian Browns is usually described as something organized and thoughtful, it began almost spontaneously. Valenkamp is very fond of poetry, he is saddened by the place to which the rational Dutch have pushed poetry in our time, and he decided to show the inhabitants of Leiden how beautiful verse lines are. Exactly the lines: the poems, according to Ben's idea, had to be written exclusively in the language and alphabet of the original. Of course, when we are not talking about the Latin alphabet, the poems give the Dutch the impression of a bizarre ornament. But this is one of the faces of their beauty: poetry is, in a way, a pattern of words.

The first poem that appeared on the wall of the Leiden house was Marina Tsvetaeva's lines "To my poems written so early …" Valenkamp is a great lover of Russian poetry, he considers it more developed than Dutch poetry, and he deeply regrets it. Nevertheless, in the project, about half of the poems on the walls are precisely Dutch. In Russian - five. Tsvetaeva, Khlebnikov, Blok, Mandelstam and Akhmatova.

The house on which Tsvetaeva's poem was written belonged to friends of Ben and Yan, and they easily got permission from his owner, the owner of a bookstore. The effect shocked all three. Russian tourists began to enter the shop. At first they thought that the poem was an advertisement for a Russian bookstore, then, realizing the mistake, they admitted that Tsvetaeva's lines touched the strings of their heart. Some were in tears, although they themselves did not expect it.

In total, the authors of the project were going to decorate the walls of the city with one hundred and one poems, trying to select those that describe the role of poetry and poets for humanity and the soul. The last was to be a poem by Federico García Lorca. But the inhabitants of the city asked to add a few more, and in total, one hundred and eleven walls were decorated with rows. Yes, soon after it was possible to agree with the administration of the poems on several more houses, the Leydenites themselves began to offer to place poems on their walls.

Interestingly, only one of the Russian poems has a transcription and translation into Dutch - Khlebnikov's quatrain. All other verses are presented with a view to purely visual effect. True, every time a new poem appeared, local newspapers immediately recognized and published what it was about, whose and in what language it was written. So the Leiden people now have an idea of the poetry of various countries, including, for example, Indonesian.

Each poem on the walls of Leiden is decorated in a special way to emphasize how important uniqueness and individuality are to poetry. I must say that after the project with poetry was completed, the authors did not leave the walls of Leiden alone. Now they decorate them with physical formulas. Formulas are not only issued in different fonts - they are supplemented with explanatory drawings. Now on the walls of Leiden you can see six equations: Einstein's formula of relativity, Lorentz force formula, Snell's law of refraction of light, Lorentz contraction formula, Oort constants and electron spin.

The Leiden project inspired many Russians, although in most cases attempts to repeat it on the streets of Russian cities are interpreted as vandalism. Officially, there are only poems on the wall of the Anna Akhmatova Museum in St. Petersburg. The poems of the poet, nicknamed Vyugo, are regularly painted over on the walls of Irkutsk - however, they are not yet classics, but rather the same way to convey their poems to other people's eyes and ears, as well as to run after people with a notebook, as many unknown poets do. Basically, the poems are painted over soon after they appear.

In Samara and Togliatti, on the walls, you can find poems of the classics, transferred there with the help of an ordinary black marker by unknown enthusiasts. And in 2015, an All-Russian graffiti competition with poems or lines from prose on the walls of cities was held. The competition was attended by quite official organizations, such as libraries and museums. The winner was the artist Alexandra Suvorova, who designed house 27 on Moscow Shmitovskiy Proezd Street with a quote from the book "The Geographer Drank His Globe Away".

Most often, wall paintings are just signatures of teenagers who are supposed to tell the world what a person is in the world. But sometimes street art is really art, like philosophical graffiti that seem to have become a continuation of real life, from a French artist.