Wojciech Kass was born in 1964 in Gdynia, a large port city just north of Gdańsk, on the Baltic coast of Poland. He is a poet, essayist, and literary critic as well as a central member of the editorial board of the literary publishing house Topos. A member of the Polish writers’ association Stowarzyszenie Pisarzy Polskich, Kass has received such awards as a Gloria Artis Bronze Metal from the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage and the Kazimierza Iłłakowiczówna First Book Award in 2000. He is also the director of the Museum of Konstanty Ildefons Gałczyński located in the middle of the woods in the Mazurian Lake District, a forest lodge, where Gałczyński himself found both personal and lyrical refuge during the height of the Stalinist years in the early 1950s. Kass’s many books of poetry include Wiry i Sny (Gyres and Dreams, 2008), Do światła (To the Light, 1999), Jeleń Thorwaldsena (Thorwaldsen’s Deer, 2000), Prószenie i pranie (Spray and Wash, 2002), Gwiazda głóg (Star Hawthorn, 2005), Przepływ cieni (Influx of Shadow, 2003), 41 (2010), Przestwór. Godziny (Expanse/Hours, 2015), Ufność: Trzy poematy (Trust: Three Long-Poems, 2018), and Pocałuj światło (Kiss the Light, 2016). His work has also appeared in Tadeusz Dąbrowski’s Poza slowa: Antologia Wierszy 1976-2006 (Beyond Words: An Anthology of Poetry 1976-2006) and Kazimierz Nowosielski’s Między słowem a światłem: Poezja i malarstwo współczesnich artystów Wybrzeża (Between Word and Light: The Poetry and Painting of Contemporary Artists of the Coast, 2006). “The Center of the Bed” is from Kass’s collection Wiry i Sny, which was published by Topos in 2008. Here in the United States, Daniel Bourne’s translations of Kass’s work have previously appeared in Poet Lore and Deluge.

Daniel Bourne is the author of several books including The Household Gods, which was published by the Cleveland State University Poetry Center in 1995. His poems have appeared in such journals as Apple Valley Review, Field, Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, Conduit, Boulevard, Guernica, Salmagundi, Yale Review, Pleiades, Quarterly West, Willow Springs, Witness, Shenandoah, Prairie Schooner, Plume, New Letters, Indiana Review, Many Mountains Moving, and Cimarron Review. Until his recent retirement, Bourne taught in the English Department and in the Environmental Studies Program at The College of Wooster in Ohio. The founding editor and current translation editor of Artful Dodge, he has also been the recipient of four Ohio Arts Council poetry fellowships and a Fulbright fellowship for the translation of younger Polish poets. Since 1980, he has lived periodically in Poland. Bourne’s translations of Polish poets appear widely, including in River Styx, Quarterly West, Willow Springs, Northwest Review, Partisan Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Colorado Review, Mid-American Review, Plume, and other literary journals. A book of his translations of Polish poet Bronisław Maj, Extinction of the Holy City, will be published by Free Verse Editions/Parlor Press in 2023.