La metapoesía de Gelman desde la estilística de Riffaterre. El caso de “Arte poética”

Abstract

Specialized literary criticism tries to define what literature is, including poetry. In this reflection, the ideas of the poets themselves must be considered, reflected in those poems that talk about poetry: metapoetry. This poses a problem of literary interpretation. Michel Riffaterre's hermeneutics is a useful methodological and analytical tool to deal with the interpretation of texts, since it proposes a series of systematized steps that consider both the characteristics of the poem and its intertextuality in the reading process. Metapoetry is a recurring genre in Latin American literature and Juan Gelman is a renowned exponent of it. Riffaterre's stylistic and hermeneutical analysis methods were applied to Gelman's poem “Arte poética”, chosen for its thematic and formal relevance. In the research, multiple ungrammaticalities were identified in the poem; The possibilities of meaning they offer were established due to their intertextual relationship with the historical genre of poetics. Finally, the structural matrix was resolved, which explains the logic followed by the variants within the poem and gives rise to the hypograms and the text itself. The poetic craft is proposed as torture and poetry as the expression of the poet's sensitivity in a forced and inevitable response to life's experiences in a failed attempt to combat death. This contribution is a step in a larger search, that of the aesthetic ideas about literary art present in Latin American poetry, which shows the relevance and usefulness of this type of approach.