ROSETTA_MAGAZINE_201303

102 103
ThE RELATIONShIp OF LOVE AND GEOGRAphY IN CEMAL
SÜREYA’S pOETY
By Özgür Özmeral Turkey
Translated by Mesut Senol
In his love poems, Cemal Süreya transmits his intellectual and
emotional resources based on his own realities into his verses.
The poet speaks out at every turn about the “exile” he has gone
through, and while citing this fact in his poetry he combines it with
the subject of the “love” he has experienced in its geographical and
historical dimensions. The woman in his poems seems to be his
companion, with her wanderer and nomadic identity. He catches
certain cross currents, and he portrays them through imagery.
“Geography and history, the East and the West, reality and fantasy,
legend and the future intersect in his poetry. In other words, the
location dimension keeps ahead of the time dimension. Cemal
Süreya’s poetics involves movement and geography. It means exile,
a nomad and a wanderer. So much so he would like to go about
even after he dies:
‘Have me go about a bit before I die’ 6
The movement of love resembles the behavior of a traveler who cannot
put up with losing time. It is pushy, and it continuously tries to increase
its speed. He describes love and making love in his poem called
“Repute” with the word galloping which is “the fastest running form of a
horse”:
“My breath becomes a red horse
I figure it out for my face is on fire
We are poor, and our nights are too short
We ought to make love at a gallop”
Since material and spiritual poverty derive from inside of life, it
gives rise to the sense of running late, that the gap should be
closed as soon as possible, and one has to move quicker. From this
perspective there is a speed where love and sexuality transform into
motion, and this speed demonstrates itself in the woman’s body
which is to be explored. The woman’s body in Cemal Süreya’s poetry
seems to be geography, a meeting point embracing the land and
the sea, where sometimes it turns into a continent or another time
6 Doğu Perinçek, Exile-Legend-Fantasy- Materyalizm, Hürriyet Gösteri 111, “Cemal Süreya Supplement” (February 1990): 36.
7 Süreya, Love Words, San (Repute) 24.