1991
Three Owls on a Chest of Drawers
The literature on the Italian sestina by the anonymous "Autore della Civetta"1 now fills a not inconsiderable shelf, so anyone essaying a Rezep-tionsgeschichte of this brief but significant poem cannot fail, in taking on the mantle of its doxologist, to come up against a certain amount of touchy expertise.
Still, with all due respect to our illustrious predecessors and contemporaries, it may not be without some interest to repeat here the text that has inspired so many different interpretative readings, the nude simulacrum of the jouissances that are eluded there, writing and graphos, significant passage, imago, and perhaps phantom.2
Let us first consider the text-ture of the definitive version that Segre, 3 with fastidious precision, established as long ago as 1970:
Amharabà ciccì coccò,
tre civette sul comò
che facevano l'amore
con la figlia del dottore.
Ma la mamma le chiamò...
Ambarabà ciccì coccò.
(literal translation:
Ambarabà ciccì coccò
three snow owls on the chest of drawers
that were making love
with the daughter of the doctor.
But the mama called them...
Ambarabà ciccì coccò)
A certain number of versions of this sestina exist in other languages, à savoir the French version produced by the Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle. It reads as follows:
Ambaraba cici coco,
trois chouettes qui font dodo
en baisant sur la commode
une fille très à la mode.
Mais maman cria aussitôt:
Ambaraba cici coco!
Note the loss of the informative "figlia del dottore" (literally "daughter of the doctor"), restored at the connotative level, however, through the reference to a girl of independent behavior.4 Then there is an anonymous German version, not without some influence of Hugo Ball and perhaps, to a keen and sensitive ear, an authoritative hint of Christian Morgenstern.
Ambaraba Zi Zi Koko,
Drei Käuze auf dem Vertiko,
Die legten sich aufs Ohr
Mit der Tochter vom Doktor,
Doch da schrie die Mutter so.
Ambaraba Zi Zi Koko!
More interesting in its poetic achievement, though surely extra moenia as far as the laws of gender and the complex of extratextual references are concerned, is the translation that the distinguished novelist and scholar Erica Jong attributes to a mysterious Count Palmiro Vicarion.5
There were three old Owls of Storrs
screwing a Girl on a big Chest of Drawers.
But the Maid was the Daughter
of a Doctor, and their Mother
cried: "Come back, lousy Owls of Storrs!"
Returning to the original, Italian text, we encounter immediately the problem that has so vexed critics: the matter of date. Although the alliteration in the first and last verses prompted Vossler, some time ago, to posit echoes of proto-Latin literature, in particular the Carmen Fratrum Arvalium,6 it is beyond doubt that the sestina cannot date from before the foundation of the University of Bologna, since the girl could then not be described as daughter of a "doctor."7 It is true, however, as Stanley Fish revealed in his magisterial study8 of the variants of the poem, that in an early manuscript the third verse does not read "che facevano l'amore" (who were making love) but rather "che facevano l'errore" (who were doing wrong), implying that, rather than making love, they were committing a sin. Thus the sense of love as crimen is in no way diminished; if anything, it is reinforced by the subtly moralistic allusion—and thus, as anyone can see, in replacing errore by amore only in the successive version, the anonymous Author achieved a remarkable paronomasia with the chiamò of the fifth verse, creating a metaplastic antithesis (rich in meta-semantic results at the level of actantial structures as well) between the anxious, protective love of the mother and the possessive and heedless love of the owls.
Of the owls or, possibly, of the girclass="underline" for, as Hobbes and Hobbes9 have observed, it is not clear whom the mother is calling. It should be obvious that the mother is concerned for her daughter, but in that case—as Allen 10 so perceptively notes—why should she call the owls and not her daughter, unless all family ties, as well as the sexual characteristics of the dramatis personae, are a good deal less obvious than they would appear at a hasty first reading?11
In any case, and to return to the problem of date, the poem does not seem to be earlier than the eleventh century A.D., and perhaps it is somewhat later if, as Le Goff suggests, "the chest of drawers appears in the practice and philosophy of interior furnishing with the decline of the feudal economy and with the rise of a peasant class of small landowners, not yet completely free, but in any case liberated from the living conditions of actual serfs. It is toward the seventeenth century, finally, that in the Ardennes there arose the custom of making love on the chest of drawers rather than on straw, not least because the chest of drawers was usually surmounted by a mirror."12 The virtually primal scene of the owls' love-making, as Marie Bonaparte13 has pointed out, can of course take place only in a peasant ambience. This observation is an elementary one, as it would be difficult to explain such a concentration of owls in an urban context.
Having thus arrived at an approximate dating of the sestina, we can examine its strophic and metric structures.
As is obvious at first sight, the poem's opening verse (repeated at the end) consists of two four-syllable units, accented on the first and fourth syllables and on the second and fourth, respectively. This introduces four chiastically arranged lines of catalectic and acatalectic trochaic dimeter; the six verses obey an a b c c b a rhyme scheme. A difficult and "splendid achievement," as Scholes14 observes, when you consider that in an earlier version (of uncertain provenance) the second verse read "tre civette sulla casset-tiera" (three owls on the cupboard), with obvious loss of metric and accentual vigor.
In any case, an impressive structural analysis of the sestina can be found in Les Chouettes, the masterly study by Jakobson and Lévi-Strauss. The authors take special pains to underline how the first three verses present subhuman entities (the owls and the chest of drawers), while the next three present human beings; and similarly how the second and fourth verses feature subjects while the third and fifth feature actions. This prodigious semantic symmetry is reinforced, with splendid parallelism, by an extraordinary play of phonological oppositions. In the first half of the first (and last) verse the alliteration proceeds via an oral bilabial, lax, grave, voiced, stop, diffuse, whereas in the second half there is an opposition between two pairs of voiceless orsals, in which the first alliterative pair consists of palatalized, strident, compact, diffuse, acute affricates and the second of velar, grave, compact, guttural, tense stops.