Photo: Jeroen Laven

Rotterdam CityPoem by Miquel de Palol

Every Rotterdammer knows them: the lines of poetry on the garbage trucks. It is the project called “Het gedicht is een bericht” (the poem is a message),a collaboration of the Poetry International Foundation and the Rotterdam garbage collectors, the Roteb.

Since 1988, Poetry International chooses poetry lines for the Roteb, that are applied to all the larger garbage trucks. Thus, it can happen that one sees a garbage truck somewhere in the public domain of Rotterdam with the message ‘Sometimes I believe in it / or almost' (from a poem of the French poet dichter Eugène Guillevic), or 'woe the man who is never mistaken' (from a poem of Chilean poet Nicanor Parra).

The Poetry International Foundation promotes poets from The Netherlands and abroad internationally, supports poets, translators of poetry, connoisseurs and devotees. It organises events, such as the Rotterdam "Poetry International Festival", "Poetry Day" and the "Poetry Kids Festival"; organises the projects “Poetry to the traveller” and “The poem is a message”; and organises literature education in schools.

The literal translation of the lines on the truck into English are:

“Where there was once a leap into emptiness
there is a rock now”

About the author

Miquel de Palol (Barcelona, 1953) is a Catalan architect, writer and storyteller. He is not nationalistic, but writes in Catalan, because he sees the language has suffered under Spanish nationalism. He would like the Catalan language to show its own face, without falling to folklore.

Miquel Palol is the latest in a line of well-known poets. His great-grandfather was a Romantic poet, his grandfather a Symbolist. He himself has already won many awards for his work, poetry as well as prose. He writes poems in a rich variety of styles, using many different registers, from baroque, labyrinthine sentence structures to colloquial speech.

He lived in Valladolid until he was seventeen, when he returned to his native city. Although he grew up outside Catalonia, he has always published in Catalan, the language of his parents, of his grandfather, the poet, novelist and playwright Miquel de Palol, and his great-grandfather, the poet Pere de Palol. In 1982 he received the ‘Carles Riba’, Catalonia’s most important poetry prize, for his collection El Porxo de les Mirades (The Arcade of Glances). For the same collection he was awarded the ‘Crítica Serra d’Or’ in 1984.

Love and self-sacrifice on the one hand, and ambition and treachery on the other, are the two poles of the world he evokes in his novels. The ‘basso continuo’ of his prose work is the arbitrary exercise of power.

Characteristic of Miquel de Palol’s poetry is its stylistic variety, its use of widely different registers, from baroque, labyrinthine sentence structures to everyday speech, conjuring up imaginary as well as starkly realistic worlds. Wisdom won from personal experience, and recollection as a structuring and motivating life force are thematic constants in the poetry of Miquel de Palol.

Text on the truck in Dutch

Daar waar eens een sprong in de leegte was
is nu een rots

Miquel de Palol 

photos Paul Kuijpers

• Rotterdam (1) - mirroring the water of the Singel
• Rotterdam (2) - Surinam's national poem
• Rotterdam (3) - on waste disposal trucks
• Rotterdam (4) - Lucebert's neon poem
• Rotterdam (5) - Rotterdam's night mayer Deelder
• Rotterdam (6) - for the visitors of Blaak market
• Rotterdam (7) - on a children's hospital
• Rotterdam (8) - by Leopold
• Rotterdam (9) - haikus on the pavement
• Rotterdam (10) - boomp boomp