Each Bored Wolves morning begins—after the whirlwind of delivering daughters to their schooling—at Kraków’s legendary Nowa Prowincja cafe-bar on ulica Bracka, with its literary heritage etched into every splitting wooden tabletop. (I drink brown coffee; they also serve me a glass of water with grapefruit slice, because they are so genuinely friendly.)
Theirs is a poetic pedigree, in particular, for here is where fixture Wisława Szymborska drank her diminutive black coffee—and rued the smoking ban, although she lit one up in the mischievous portrait holding court over her table cater-cornered to the counter.
Adam Zagajewski, too, was familiar with these premises, as was a certain Czesław Miłosz, the lion, once upon a time in the bar’s earlier “Old” incarnation. What’s more, poets who are grumpy but not dead quite yet struggle to wake up in such nooks; and gravitate post-reading, lingering till clocks forget to tock.
Once a week, I meet the Puerto Rican poet-publisher Pablo Figueroa, of the excellent San Juan–rooted poetry press Gacela del Ático, at Nowa Prowincja to chew over enjambments. Pablo, who is ensconced in Kraków for some seasons, is a romantic and true believer in Polish poetry, which he also translates into Spanish. He is currently at work on a Gacela del Ático collection of Tadeusz Różewicz. Pablo’s own collection is titled Nova Provincia, has its cover graced by a photo of its namesake’s facade with 5 tables + 7 chairs posing along the sidewalk, and contains the poem “Visita a la ciudad de Zagajewski” (Granada: Valparaíso Ediciones, 2022).
My friend, the literary translator Scotia Gilroy, an evening regular and local of decades, translates “Nowa Prowincja” slant as Hinterland, which comes to match the ragtag intellectual aura of this haunt a stone’s throw from Kraków’s swarming main square. With so much mediocrely commercialized in its vicinity, NP resists as a renegade outpost holding its ground and then some—a hinterland lodge when you step into it out of the cold; secretly the urbane beating heart of the crooked block.
(Note: Any apocryphal elements of this nutshell history are established truth.)
A chunk of the Bored Wolves catalogue was conceived and developed, designed and typeset,1 and had its printing-house test sheets spread out upon and across Nowa Prowincja’s stout tables, corners paper-weighted with coffee cups and/or beer glasses. This chunk & co. was donated to the bar’s reading library by the front door.
Seeing a certain Bored Wolves spine that was leaning /thataway/ at the left end of its shelf last week now leaning \thisaway\ over to the right end makes my morning, this very morning.
More often than not by my long-time collaborator, the Spanish graphic designer Pilar Rojo, who emigrated to Kraków the same year I arrived from New York.