Runa Bandyopadhyay

Runa Bandyopadhyay recently published an extended review of Pitch of Poetry in Chhapakhanar Goli, 21st year issue, April 2024 (W. Bengal). For this page, she adapted and extended that review to create a new essay in English, published here for the first time. I am publishing it  as part of my ongoing, transformative, collaboration with Runa, outlined in the links at the end.

Pataquerical Ballad by Runa Bandyopadhyay and Charles Bernstein. A two-volume set, one in English and one in Bengali.

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.

On November 20, 2021, Régis Bonvicino was interviewed by Runa Bandyopadhyay (India), with Aurora Fornoni Bernardini. Organized by Ekhon Bangla Kobitar Kagaj. What follows is the script for the interview, followed by the video. Below that is a short review, published in Cuba, of Bonvicino’s most recent book.

On June 15, boundary 2 editor Paul Bové convened Yunte Huang (from California), Runa Bandyopadhyay (from India), Abigail Lang (from France), and me for b2’s webinar on Topsy-Turvy,  focusing on non-U.S. perspectives, in anticipation of an issue of boundary 2 coming out in the fall. In the b2 issue, Runa gives a Vedic and Bengali spin to her reading of my poetics, Yunte writes about our ongoing mishmash of American and Chinese encounters, and Abigail continues her exploration of American/French poetry exchanges in an introduction to her translation of my work.

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 one; part two; part three; part four, part five, part six
English: one, two, three, 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) 

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.