Intertextual irony is a strategy by which an author makes non-explicit allusions to other works, and in doing so creates a double effect: (i) naive readers, who do not understand the reference, enjoy the text as if they were receiving its message for the first time (thus, if one tells them that a character makes a thrust through an arras while shouting a rat!, they miss the Shakespearean echo but are nonetheless thrilled by the dramatic situation); (ii) competent readers catch the quotation, and they sense that it is ironic, especially if the quoted situation or sentence changes its sense and implies a sort of debasement. This procedure has been defined as double coding.
A novel or a poem can be full of quotations from the universal treasury of literature without establishing any double coding. Eliot’s The Waste Land requires pages and pages of footnotes in order for its readers to identify explicit or implicit quotations from history, anthropology, art and so on. Eliot realised that there existed uninformed readers who would be unable to recognise his allusions and to realise how many there were and so added the footnotes as part of the poem itself. In this sense, The Waste Land is not a case of double coding. A reader appreciating this text only for its rhythm (for the sounds of its words, for the ghost-like literary landscape evoked by so many unknown names as Stetson, Philomel and Madame Sosostris, for quotations in German or French), is similar to a spy who eavesdrops through an open door and realises that somebody is whispering something, but lacks the indispensable code to understand what that conversation is about.
Intertextual irony has nothing to do with the fact that a text can be read at two or more levels of sense, as happened, according to the medieval hermeneutics, with the four senses of the Holy Scriptures – literal, allegorical, moral and anagogical. There are many texts that display a double level of sense: for instance parables (like the evangelical ones) and fairy tales. Certainly one can naively read the fable of the wolf and the lamb by Phaedrus as a simple report of an altercation between two animals – but to drop the moral sense of the tale would be an example of poor interpretation, and the author himself takes pains to inform his reader that de te fabula narratur.
We should distinguish a naive reading as an accident (due to lack of information on the part of the reader) from a naive reading programmed as legitimate by the author, even though a cultivated reading is equally admitted. Can one read the Divine Comedy without realising its moral purposes? A lot of romantic critics did so. Can one read the procession of the Purgatory, in the Divine Comedy, without taking into account its allegorical interpretation? Perhaps a surrealist poet could do so. But this has nothing to do with the post-modern poetics of double coding.
In Phaedrus’s tale there are two senses (literal and moral) but no double coding. In Joyce’s Ulysses there are two levels of sense (the story of Bloom as an allegory of the story of Ulysses), but Joyce wanted his readers to discover the double reading in some way, and the title itself is a clue. It is a waste of time to read Finnegans Wake and to miss its patchwork of ultraviolet allusion to the whole of human culture. The readers who read or listen to it as though they were enjoying pure music can undoubtedly be charmed by the sounds and rhythms but are not really reading what Joyce wrote.
Double coding has different purposes: it characterises a literary work which displays a lot of erudite quotations but can also attain popular success, in so far as it can be enjoyed in a naive way. To find an extreme example, take Don Quixote as rewritten by Pierre Menard, described by Borges in one of his stories. Menard succeeds, without copying, in reinventing Cervantes’s novel word by word. According to Borges, the intelligent reader is in a position to appreciate the way in which words and sentences of Menard’s text, insofar as they were written today and not centuries ago, acquire a radically different meaning from those of Cervantes – and only in this way can the irony of that imaginary rewriting be caught. However, a naive reader who has never heard of the existence of Cervantes can take the work of Menard simply as a pleasant story of a crazy knight from La Mancha.
What should translators do when facing a case like this? If by chance Menard’s book existed and had to be translated, it would be mandatory to copy the most current translation of Cervantes’s novel.
Thus, the practice of translation offers a good opportunity to recognise the strategy of double coding in a text: it is here that translators feel committed to find a way to make a quotation perceptible as such in their own language.
Think of the example I gave, when Diotallevi mentions a hedge. The translators had to identify the quotation and to decide that (if that quotation was opaque for a foreign reader) they ought to find a satisfying reference in their own literature. Otherwise they would have missed the point. This is a sort of commitment that translators from Phaedrus do not feel as part of their duty. The story of the wolf and the lamb has to be translated more or less literally and if readers do not catch the moral sense, too bad for them. The translator is not responsible.
As an author of novels where intertextual echoes play an important role, I am always pleased when a reader catches my allusions. The Island of the Day Before starts with a wink to the Île mysterieuse by Jules Verne (for instance, my protagonist wonders if the land he watches from his ship is an island or a continent, and one of the first subchapters of Verne’s novel is entitled ‘Island or continent?’). I obviously informed my translators that Roberto’s question had to be phrased like Verne’s, quoted exactly in the form it appeared in the best-known versions of Verne in their own language. Obviously the naive reader would be satisfied by reading that my poor shipwreck did not know anything about that mysterious land.
The problem, however, is to make translators aware of allusions that, for many reasons, might escape them. For this reason I usually send my translators pages and pages of notes about my various undetectable quotations – and suggest to them the way in which these quotations can be made perceptible in their own language. This problem was particularly urgent in Foucault’s Pendulum since in this text the problem of double coding is squared. There it is not only the author who suggests occult quotations: there are the characters (at least Belbo, Casaubon and Diotallevi) who ironically and explicitly quote from the treasury of world literature (as we have seen in the case of the hedge).
For example, in chapter 11, one of the files written at the computer by Jacopo Belbo (who sets up imaginary worlds, largely intertextual, in order to overcome his neurosis at being an editor who, like Diotallevi, is unable to see life if not through literature) deals with a hero called Jim della Canapa. The hero’s deeds are a collage of adventurous stereotypes: names of places in Polynesia or of Malaysian seas are nonchalantly mixed with those of other parts of the world where literature has situated stories of passion and death under the palm trees. My instructions to translators said that Jim della Canapa had to be translated by a name able to evoke the South Seas or something similar, not necessarily literally – it seemed to me that, in English, Hemp Jim would not sound right. It was not mandatory to mention hemp. Jim could have sold, instead of hemp, coconuts, and so become Coconut Jim or Seven Seas Jim. What had to be detected was that this character was a mixture of Lord Jim, Corto Maltese, Gauguin and Sanders of the River.
Thus Jim became Jim de la Papaye in French, Seven Seas Jim in English, Jim el del Càñam in Spanish, curiously enough O Tzim tes kànnabes in Greek and, with a very beautiful reference to Kurt Weill, Surabaya-Jim in German.
In The Island of the Day Before every chapter has a title which suggests only vaguely what it is about. As a matter of fact, I feel proud to have found for every chapter the title of a seventeenth-century book. It was a tour de force, but a poorly paying one, since my play was understood only by a few specialists of that period and mainly by rare-book dealers and bibliophiles. Sometimes I ask myself if by chance I write novels purely in order to put in hermetic references that are comprehensible only to me. I feel like a painter who, in a landscape, puts among the leaves of the trees – almost invisible – the initials of his beloved. And it does not matter if not even she is able to identify them.
But I wanted my translators to make my play understandable in their own language. For certain books there was not only their contemporary, translated title, but also the one of their ancient original.
