Magin_Edward-thesis

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3.7 Quçan on imagery in his poetry
Poetry is understood to be a creative means of expression. One notable moment in
my interview with Mihsin Quçan was when he talked about his utilization of popular
Kurdish traditions of dream interpretation in his poetry. He says:
In Kurdish tradition, for example, if you see blood in your dream, it means
you will depart from something. Or if you see that your tooth is pulled out,
it means you will die or something. (Quçan 2010)
Quçan collected these ideas and “put them in his poetry with a new angle, a new way”
(Quçan 2010). These are things that the outsider, the person from another culture, cannot
know. The outsider has little familiarity with such old traditions and beliefs.
At the writing of this thesis, I did not have the opportunity with a native speaker
to identify if this specific dream imagery is present in the corpus. There is one poem by
Quçan that deals with blood and begins with references to dreams―Birînên Şevên
Xwînelo, ‘Wounds of Night Covered in Blood.’ However, I do not see this specific image
in the poem, which seems to predominantly be concerned with real life experience―not
dreams. Teyb’s Xewinek, ‘A Dream,’ also contains dream imagery requiring
interpretation.