A Lullaby for Jacobo Fijman: Metapoetics and Interpretive Keys

Abstract

This paper considers Jacobo Fijman’s essayistic writing, which, throughout the reading, emerges as metapoetic insofar as it offers certain keys for interpreting his poetry. Thus, the essays acquire a significant value by shedding light on a poetic production of very limited intelligibility. Our analysis is informed, among other approaches, by semantics and generative poetics.

The conclusions we reach are several; most of them confirm, through this new path, certainties or suspicions already sustained by previous research, as indicated in the bibliography. For example, these essays partly explain the austerity characteristic of Fijman’s last poetry collection, the configuration of an annihilated subject, and a discursive structure in constant movement.

The decisive conclusion is that the lullaby, as the first genre to which one has access, acts as a basic structure in a large part of Fijman’s poetry. From there, expression becomes possible despite the violence exerted by madness and mystical rapture. In turn, through the detection of features of melopoeia, the fundamental role of orality is especially highlighted, both in encoding and decoding. The lullaby also points to the peculiar presence/absence of the “other”, constitutive of the mother-child “we”.