ROSETTA_MAGAZINE_201303

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A high school girl missed the exam hour
We ran into her on a suburban train,
Oh deadlock you always win!
Hey bus-lover, O Troy’s passenger!
You will remember we had talked for days
That woman with a SW (silkworm) voice;
She was getting prepared for becoming somebody’s Greenland.” 12
The unhappiness and deadlocked situation of the high school
girl that the narrator runs into at a bustling place, convey the
poetic self to another subject and location through connotations.
The words “Bus-lover” and “Troy’s Passenger” particularly are
picked to emphasize the dynamic structure. Here the vertical
leap between two subjects is a technique underlining the theme.
“Preparative lines”, which we come across often in Cemal
Süreya’s poems, is exemplified in the first part of this poem. The
real subject in the poetry, woven in the axes of “unhappiness”
and “deadlock”, happens to be none other than “the woman with
silkworm voice who also gets prepared to become somebody’s
Greenland.” Concrete impressions carry the dynamic and unsteady
structure into the stable location. The geographical identity
of Greenland and “the woman with the silkworm voice” are
integrated. Here external elements point to Greenland, the biggest
island of the world with an area of 2,175 600 sq kilometers. This
glacier country where there is scarcely any settled life carries
weight because it is an important geographical feature of the
earth. This feature attributed to the woman who is becoming
Greenland, described as “somebody’s” in the poem, seems
significant in terms of the impact of the human-nature relations
often observed in Cemal Süreya.
One of the far away geographical locations identified by the
poet happens to be “Dove land”. To ensure that the narrator’s
relationship with the woman will not be stuck somewhere, it is
taken to a far away geographical place. This is not done only out
of concern for the meaning, but is also interwoven with concern
for style. In the poem the experienced love and sexuality were
reflected in the right proportions according to the attributes
of the woman. This could be considered as giving importance
to the far away geography’s context of “the oppressed” and
“underdevelopment”. Until the end of the last part of the poem,
12 Süreya, Love Words, Unhappiness Smiling 256.
13 Kaplan 274.
which is divided into five sections, the narrator transmits the love
he experienced to the whole world, and he makes the woman
nearly the center of the opening to the entire world.
“Making love comes into force again
On every land pieces
Africa included”
[…]
“A separate heart is beating inside every hair fiber
For all the land pieces
Africa included”
[…]
“On every piece of land
Blooming in most reputable reds
Africa included”
[…]
“After all they execute us shooting every day
Whole day
On every piece of land
Africa included”
[…]
“The actual poverty gets started afterwards
On every piece of land
Africa not excluded”
“We are riding on a tramcar heading from Lâleli to the world.”
“In the line above, we are witnessing a notable enlargement of
location. This enlargement has to do with the love the poet harbors
for his lover. “ 14
In his poem called “Come On Come Here”, the extreme points on
the map explain the nature of a relationship:
14 Mehmet Kaplan, ibid.
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