Translated material
Brussels, palimpsest, Bunimovich
Poems of the Moscow Commissioner for Children's Rights graced the capital of Europe
A palimpsest is a piece of parchment on which, for lack of another, new ones were written on top of old texts. The base is the same, and the new words on it hide the earlier ones. Not that they completely hide, if you look closely ... All ...
A palimpsest is a piece of parchment on which, for lack of another, new ones were written on top of old texts. The base is the same, and the new words on it hide the earlier ones. Not that they hide it completely, if you look closely... The whole history of Europe is a palimpsest.
The Moscow poet Yevgeny Bunimovich called this a cycle of poems about the Brussels quarter of Molenbeek, having walked along it with a local old-timer, artist Henri Jacobs.
He saw there a Flemish village that fed old Brussels with milk and bread, an industrial outskirts of a French-speaking city where factories with Italian workers coexisted with Jewish workshops and shops, the poorest district of modern Brussels, where immigrants from Morocco live, and chic residential lofts are housed in converted factory buildings. workshops along the canal... All layers of Molenbeek's history.
Inspired by poems, Henri Jacobs painted a panel, and it adorned the wall of the old house, which was bare in anticipation of the imminent new building. The picture is woven from overlapping lines - Flemish, French, Arabic, Russian ... And during the reconstruction of the Brussels Canal embankment, which separates the center of the capital and Molenbeek, this motif was transferred to the sidewalk, embodied in a kilometer-long line of light and dark tiles.
For four years already, the Brussels association of writers and lovers of literature "Beskhreif" ("Description") has been implementing the project "Brussels Poems - Poetry in the City". His goal is to bring poetry to the most unattractive, neglected quarters, to draw attention to them. The chosen quarter is given for "study" to a foreign poet and Belgian artist. The tandem gives birth to poetry and visuals. Residents evaluate the work, choose a place and give the go-ahead to the artist.
Belgian Deputy Prime Minister Lauret Onkelinx, head of government of the Brussels-Capital Region Charles Piqué and Mayor of Molenbeek Philippe Moureau laid the last tiles in the pavement mosaic at a gathering of local press on Wednesday.
Belgian Deputy Prime Minister Loret Onkelinx to Novaya Gazeta: “Great idea! This is a culture for the people in a good sense of the word. They breathed soul into the beautification of the embankment, inscribed poetry into the everyday life of the townspeople. Poems by a Russian poet in four languages in stone on a Belgian pavement are also a symbol of the mixture of languages and cultures in a modern European city.”
Evgeny Bunimovich
Molenbeck. Palimpsest (excerpts)
the sun fell over the horizon without a visa rain falls through the city without documents the grass crawled out without permission the air stolen by the lungs is not certified
life is illegal
***
like a schoolboy before a test, I repeat by heart the simple geometry of the streets, squares, windows, cubes and parallelepipeds, factory blocks
the bell tower is perpendicular to the market, which was to be proved
beyond the canal line, the pentagon of brussels life on two banks does not intersect, this is an axiom of parallels, it does not require proof, it requires understanding
*
the girl in the window, embarrassed, hid behind the curtain, the student on the run touched her bag, looked around, the pot-bellied bartender lazily left the counter, brought tea
witnesses and eyewitnesses
wet dog on a leash
top side back
the bum lying at the crossroads saw my shoes two crows on a rusty pipe saw my broken umbrella the gypsy saw my palm the contents of my pockets the police see everything
my life is a permanent alibi
*
railroad track separates more reliably than all languages and gods
cuts the earth sky sound landscape smellmolenbek old and new east west
only one name for all yes weather forecast yes shunt long pedestrian crossings