Mars za Wenerą skryty
Mars Hidden behind Venus

One more Attempt at Solving Jan Kochanowski’s “Gadka”

Summary/Abstract: The text is one more attempt at solving the literary riddle contained in Jan Kochanowski’s “Gadka.” The piece is ambiguous; efforts to dismantle it were made by such eminent scholars as Julian Krzyżanowski and Janusz Pelc, as well as by younger generation researchers, namely Joanna Duska, Radosław Grześkowiak, Maciej Eder. Each of them pondered over what “źwierzę o jednym oku” (“an animal with one eye”) indeed was, and none of the analyses brought a concluding solution. The suggested proposals point to designates referring to erotic-scatological matter (male or female bottom, female sex organ, portable toilet) or to matters unconnected to it (firearm: a piece of ordnance or its smaller counterpart, a musket). It must be remembered that older generation researchers favoured the respectable (artillery) solutions while the younger one turned to the obscene. A next solution to the riddle is contained in the article. It differs from the previous ones above all in that it considers not only “Gadka’s” cultural and poetic contexts (sufficiently analysed by the abovementioned scholars), but it is an example of a detailed lexical examination which respects the meanings of individual words, phrases, and even syntactic elements present in the text. As a result, it is a semantic analysis, referring to the 16th c. Polish language condition, i.e. to the texts produced at the time when “Gadka” was composed. The basic tool that facilitated such analysis was “Słownik polszczyzny XVI wieku” (“Dictionary of 16th Century Polish”), containing excerpts from over 700 texts written at the times of the Polish Renaissance.

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