Bengali poetry

Conversations with Bengali poets

Runa Bandyopadhyay and I did a bilingual poetry reading followed by a conversation with several Bengali poets (January 29 and 30, 2022). 

In the first video I read “If Sappho Were a UFO,” “Shelter in Place,” “Zeno’s Way,” “Strike!,” and 
“Covidity” (all from Topsy Turvy except “Strike!,” which is from Recalculating

In the second video, Runa joins me for a conversation with Pronab Kumar Dey, Swapan Roy, Umapada Kar, Prabhat Mukherjee, Pranab K. Chakraborty, Prashanta GuhaMajumder, Kaushik Chakrabarty, Rudra Kinshuk, and Abhishek Ray.

Runa Bandyopadhyay — Bernstein's Jewish Dharmma: An Upanishadic Quantum Poetics

Runa Bandyopadhyay has translated into Bengali, with extended, performative commentary, my essay “The Pataquerical Imperative: Midrashic Antinomianism and the Promise of Bent Studies.” from Pitch of Poetry: “Patquerical Nightshow” in  Ongshumali (W. Bengal / Berlin): 
Bengali: part onepart two; part three; part four, part five, part six
Englishonetwothree, four, five, six

More recently, Bandyopadhyay has written, in English, a  response to my poem “Twelve-Year Horoscope” (a poem that will be included in Topsy-Turvy):  "On/extending “Twelve-Year Universal Horoscope”: Sybil (2020)
She has also written a review of Topsy-Turvy at Sybli (2021) 

Runa Bandyopadhyay: The Bernsteinian paradox

I very much appreciate Runa Bandyopadhyay's response to Near/Miss together with her translation and commentary on "Thank You for Saying Thank You" and "Thank you for Saying Your're Welcome," in Aparjan.com (Kolkata, W. Bengal). I initially posted a rough Google translation of the Bengali essay, which prompted  Bandyopadhyay to do her own quick translation. She writes:

The word Nirvana in the google translation triggers me to translate my Bengali commentaries into English because I feel the word Nirvana doesn’t go along with a poet. A poet always longing to reborn like a Bodhisattva, whose longing was not only for him but also for others, his desire of salvation along with all distressed creatures of the world on his way of enlightenment. A poet’s expansive consciousness puts him from certainty to uncertainty, from comfort to discomfort, from insanity to sanity and only he could see how the actual world revolves. A poet thinks that the interior of the boundary is the exterior and the exterior is the interior - I am free and you are imprisoned and so he always try to give a hand to distressed.

Bengali poetry/electro-magnetics guy

The Cincinnati-based engineer Aryanil Mukherjee has built a web site featuring translations of Bengali poetry. Aryanil listened to the recent PoemTalk episode on Zukofsky and responded as someone knowledgeable about electro-magnetics. Word from PennSound's Managing Editor Mike Hennessey is that we will soon have a Aryanil Mukherjee author page (readings of translations). So stay tuned.

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