Interview: A cloud floated in the sky/ On a cloud floated an entire sky: Anti-Dramatic Legacies of the Prose Poem in Bengali

Aryanil Mukherjee and Souradeep Roy on the life of the Bengali prose-poem.

This conversation between the Bengali poet and translator, Aryanil Mukherjee and Almost Island's Souradeep Roy is partly a conversation on the history of the prose-poem in Bengali, a tradition that is a hundred years old now. It is not a comprehensive history of the form but reflections on the form through Mukherjee's own adventures into the form and its creative possibilities for writing Bengali verse. It also gives us an overview of poetic experiments in Bengali and their possible counterparts in North America  in the twenty-first century, opening up the possibilities of comparing literary movements in different parts of the world. The conversation is about language, particularly syntax, but it is also about landscape, memory, and, quite extensively, cinema.

Aryanil Mukherjee is a bilingual poet, translator and editor who has authored seventeen books of poetry and essays in two languages. Anthology appearances include: The Harper-Collins Book of Indian Poetry in English (2011), The Literary Review Indian Poetry (New Jersey: Fairleigh Dickinson University, 2009); Indivisible: An Anthology of South Asian American Poetry (University of Arkansas Press, 2010), La Pared de Agua, a Spanish anthology of contemporary Bengali poetry (Madrid:Olifante Press, 2011). His poetry has been discussed in the Best American Poetry Blog and has been translated into Hindi and Spanish. Aryanil edits Kaurab, a Bengali language webzine of experimental poetry and poetics. A fellow of the International Society of Industrial & Applied Mathematics, Aryanil works as an engineering mathematician in Cincinnati, USA.

Souradeep Roy is a writer, translator and academic. His play based on the 1943-44 Bengal famine, How to Make Rice premiered in London in 2022. His earlier play and translation, A Brief Loss of Sanity, was published in the bilingual journal Kaurab. He is also working on his PhD at Queen Mary, University of London, where he is writing a history of the Bengal unit of the Indian Peoples' Theatre Association in the 1940s and the group theatre movement thereafter.