WRITING ON THE WALL 101 REASONS TO VISIT LEIDEN

The Lorca wall poem is the 101^st and last in a series of art installations “Wall Poems” attached to buildings in the Netherlands city of Leiden.

DE PROFUNDIS

By Federico Garcia Lorca

Los cien enamorados

Duermen para siempre

Bajo la tierra seca.

Andalucia tiene

Largos caminos rojos.

Cordoba, olivos verdes

Donde poner cien cruces,

Que los recuerden.

Los cien enamordos

Duermen para simple.

ALONG THE ZONNEVELDSTRAAT-- “De Profundis,” by Spanish poet Federico García Lorca appears on the wall of the Leiden Law School’s Kamerlingh Onnes Gebouw building, at the intersection of  Langebrug and Zonneveldstraat Streets, Leiden, The Netherlands.

The Lorca wall poem is the 101^st and last in a series of art installations “Wall Poems,” which was funded by the private foundation of Ben Walenkamp and Jan-Willem Bruins, the project's two artists, with additional funding from several corporations and the city of Leiden.

Federico Garcia Lorca

The art project in Leiden was launched in 1992 with a poem in Russian by Marina Tsvetaeva. To date other poets included in the series boast e.e. cummings, Langston Hughes, Du Fu, Louis Oliver, Pablo Neruda, W.B. Yeats, Rainer Maria Rilke and William Shakespeare.

Many of the wall works are accompanied by plaques with translations into Dutch and English. A guide available on the web describes a walking tour for visitors to Leiden that takes in 25 of the 101 poems.

The first 43 poems have been collected in a book by Marleen van der Weij called  “Dicht op de muur: gedichten in Leiden”, and the rest are described in a second volume, published in 2005.