Frankfurt anthology: Cemal Süreya: "The four seasons"

In a folk song tone - four stanzas of four lines each - lovers are addressed, even called upon.

Your love is a thing of the past, you made it.

Now they are to be laid to rest.

The chorus knows.

The first and last lines of the stanzas are identical, only the indication of the season changes.

We know songs that describe the seasonal changes in the fields.

You talk about plowing, sowing, harvesting.

The seasons of love are mentioned here.

And the fields are graves.

The middle pair of lines in each stanza is also joined in the same way. It names how the lovers met and in what way they loved each other. In spring like leaves, like fragrances. So it is easy, grazing, mingling with one another. Then summery, more violent, in the tremors of a “first time” or in the surrender of a safe farewell. Autumn brings together grapes and hemlock. Matured abundance and harvest, fulfillment and death. For winter, as for summer, the poem has no image of nature. Now social structures appear. Encounter is no longer the first or last time, but a crossroads, occasional clashes, a moving field of connections, melancholy, elementary.

But why should lovers be put in graves?

Because the only eternal union may lie in death?

But why then in graves that are marked with the seasons?

The old word about the field of death is reminiscent of the earth.

The seed rests in the earth and will bring new fruit.

The graves of the four seasons enclose and preserve moments of special and ever-changing intimacy.

They are kept in the graves.

You can remember them.

With this, however, the four stanzas of the seasons are themselves four graves that hold the most precious life experiences.

And Cemal Süreya's folk-song poem “Dört Mevsim” - Fazil Say set it to music, Serenad Bağcan sang it - becomes the soil for the old seeds of love.

The old seeds of love

Cemal Süreya, born in Pülümür, an Eastern Anatolian mountain village, lost his mother at the age of six, she belonged to the Zaza population. “I don't remember her face, but I remember her gestures.” His father was a Kurdish Alevite. After the Dersim uprising, the last great uprising of the Kurds (1937/38) against the Turkish state, which allegedly resulted in 13,000 deaths, the rest of the family was banished to a nest near Bursa. The boy was smuggled to live with relatives in Istanbul. His mother had read him fairy tales, Anatolian love stories. He was twelve when he discovered “Guilt and Atonement” in the school library, “The Brothers Karamazov”. He devours the books. This was his "second birth". Political Science and Economics in Ankara; later tax inspector in Istanbul.For a while he is the director of the Istanbul Mint. Since a poem doesn't make money, he said, it is important for a poet to find a second job. And that should be as far removed from the lyric as possible. It is then “as easy as breathing in” to let go of the bread-and-butter job.

When his debut “Üvercinka” appeared in 1958, the volume of poems was a literary sensation. The book quickly became a symbol of the lyrical avant-garde “Second New”, which set itself apart from “Garip”, a movement around Orhan Veli, and also from Nazim Hikmet, the grand master of the new Turkish poetry. In contrast to these predecessors, the poets of the “Second New” are not explicitly political. But they are radically private and playful of language. You break up words, put them together again. For example, “Üvercinka” is a neologism from the words dove (

) and wing (

). These avant-garde poets break all taboos. They write about love and sex, alcohol and melancholy, suicide.

“My poetry is erotic. I think that is the most striking quality of my poetry. ”Cemal Süreya was probably the first Turkish poet to write a poem about coitus. “Glorie” begins like this: “A red bird is my breath”. Now the ego takes a you on its lap, its legs become longer and its breath becomes a “red horse” until the verses end: “We are poor, our nights are short / galloping we have to love each other”.

In restrictive systems, the private becomes increasingly political.

And so it is not surprising that, since the Gezi Park movement, young people in Istanbul and Ankara have sprayed Süreya's verses, like those of the other poets of the “Second New”, on public walls, walls and bridges.

You photograph them and put them on the net before they can be painted over.

Süreya's lovers become guarantors of personal freedom.

His verses are a lyrical pulse of democracy.