A Fine Piece of Ass. Solving Jan Kochanowski’s Gadka

Abstract

The collection of Fraszki by Kochanowski contains one riddle (III 78), the answer to which is still widely debated by researchers. The curtly described animal “with just one eye, / standing between a thigh and a thigh” [own trans.] has been interpreted as a musket resting on a stand, a cannon on a platform, but also a homosexual’s anus, a female anus, a penis, a vagina, recently also an old-fashioned outhouse. The paper discusses the poetics of the Old Polish ribald riddle, which suggested indecent associations but eventually provided an innocent answer and embarrassed its recipients for their unseemly thoughts. It turns out, however, that in contrast to the theses put forward up to now, Kochanowski’s Gadka is not such a type of text and should have an unambiguous answer. Detailed lexical analysis of the epigram debunks some of the answers proposed so far (it cannot be a firearm, a penis or an outhouse). The idea according to which the epigram refers to a female anus, despite its inarguable advantages (it does not breach the heteronormativity present in Kochanowski’s erotic poems and constitutes a syncretic combination of erotic and fecal themes of the riddle), is eventually exposed as unacceptable in view of past attitudes towards sodomy, the understanding of which also comprised anal sex. The 17th-century imitators of Gadka – the anonymous author of two variations on the riddle and Stanisław Samuel Szemiot – believed the answer to the riddle was the female reproductive organ. The author of this paper also supports this thesis, giving it grounds by providing comprehensive comparative data on Old Polish erotic riddles concerning the vagina.