Cemal Süreya
Turkish poet (1931–1990)
Cemal Süreya, known by his given name as Cemalettin Seber (1931, Erzincan – 9 January 1990, Istanbul), was a Zaza Kurd 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.
Biography
Cemal Süreya, whose real name was Cemalettin Seber, was born in Pülümür, Erzincan (now in Tunceli Province) in 1931. His exact birthday is unknown.
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Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 1, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q982905. VIAF identifies the subject as 118012827. The Library of Congress control number is n84051744. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1931, 1990, 1958 and 1965.
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This entry incorporates text from “Cemal Süreya” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.