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Poetry brightens up Warsaw metro

PR dla Zagranicy
John Beauchamp 09.03.2015 12:02
A three-week project aimed at bringing poetry closer to the man-in-the-street has been launched on the Warsaw underground.
Photo:  PAP/Leszek SzymańskiPhoto: PAP/Leszek Szymański

The poems are displayed on the trains and stations, in the original and the Polish translation. They are by writers from twenty countries, including Spain, Portugal, Romania, Ukraine and Poland.

President of the Wisława Szymborska Foundation, Michał Rusinek, told Polish Radio that the underground is ideally suited for the promotion of poetry.

Rusinek said that Szymborska, the 1996 Nobel Prize winner, once received a letter from a fireman in Texas who bought a volume of her poems after he had read her verse while travelling on the underground.

The ‘Poems on the Underground’ project has returned to Warsaw after a four-year break. It is organised by the Polish branch of the European Union National Institutes for Culture.

The first Polish edition of the project, in 2008, was inspired by similar events which have been held in London, Dublin, Paris, New York, Barcelona, and Stockholm since 1986. (mk/jb)

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