Cemal Süreya

Cemal Süreya, known by his given name as Cemalettin Seber (1931, Erzincan – 9 January 1990, Istanbul), was a Kurdish-Zaza, Alevi poet, writer, and translator. He was one of the pioneering poets of the İkinci Yeni (Second New Poetry) movement, a modernist movement in Turkish poetry. Although he made his first attempts at poetry with sketches in middle school and aruz in high school, his true poetic work began during his university years. In addition to his poetry collections; Üvercinka (1958), Göçebe (1965), Beni Öp Sonra Doğur Beni (1973), Uçurumda Açan (1984), Sıcak Nal (1988), Güz Bitigi (1988), and Sevda Sözleri (1990); he also wrote essays, critiques, diaries, and anthologies.

The most frequent themes in his works are love, women, loneliness, social and political criticism, death, the idea of God, portraits, and poetics in verse. He also translated nearly forty books from French into Turkish. With the exception of Onüç Günün Mektupları (1990), all of his articles and poems were first published in magazines and newspapers and then turned into books. Süreya, who held a socialist worldview, published the magazine Papirüs, in which he expressed his literary views and used it as a tool to express his ideas as an intellectual.