10.13125/2039-6597/1397
More than in other areas of research, linguistic features of gayspeak and topics relative to homosexuality appear to be sensitive to issues such as the time of production of the text, the context, the patronage (i.e. distribution companies and broadcasters), time of broadcast and type of audience. Although early explorations of language and sexuality concerned themselves almost exclusively with lexical items, recognised as the feature which could best reveal the sociocultural qualities of a group of people,  the analysis of gayspeak has benefited, in more recent years, from the intersection of other fields of studies. Research has thus been extended from lexicon to other linguistic and non linguistic areas which may have ideological import and which can be used as valid tools also in the field of audiovisual translation. These considerations have influenced the analysis of the present case study, an investigation of the dialogue exchanges containing features of gayspeak in the five seasons of the drama series Six Feet Under (Alan Ball, USA, 2001-2005).
application/pdf
2039-6597
1397
9
en
Irene Ranzato
Between
manipulation
“God Forbid, a Man!”: Homosexuality in a Case of Quality TV
Text.Serial.Journal
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/between
5
Walls, Screens, Photographs - Planes of Censorship
2015-05-19
2015-01-18
2015-05-31
2015-05-31
1
Irene Ranzato
2015/05/19
10.13125/2039-6597/1397
Sapienza Università di Roma
2039-6597
9
manipulation
en
“God Forbid, a Man!”: Homosexuality in a Case of Quality TV
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/between/article/download/1397/1520
5
“God Forbid, a Man!”: Homosexuality
      in a Case of Quality TV
                                Irene Ranzato


            Gayspeak and Audiovisual Translation
     Early explorations of language and sexuality concerned
themselves almost exclusively with lexical items. The main reason for
this was the assumption that the specialised vocabulary of a group
reveals something about «the sociocultural qualities about that group»
(Sonenschein 1969: 281). Although, by the 1980s, works that examined
other dimensions of language were added to those on lexicon, the early
focus on gay in-group vocabulary continues today, as is evidenced by
the publication of various glossaries, dictionaries and articles on the
subject (Kulick 2003: 121)1. Incidentally, one of the effects of the focus
on lexicon has been the tendency to restrict research to the language
practices of homosexual men, who were held to have an extensive in-
group "lingo" that could be documented and which women do not
have (ibid.: 121-122).
     The interest on lexicon is immediately and quite obviously
interesting for researchers in audiovisual translation (AVT) and for
those interested in ideology in particular. Lexicon analysis can indeed
be useful to unveil ideological manipulation in translation, but it can
also tell us much about the language and cultural systems at play in

     1
      Among these investigations, notable are the ones on Polari, the most
comprehensive extant form of British gay slang. Polari’s high renaissance oc-
curred during the 1960s, when it was popularized in England in the main-
stream BBC Radio series Round the Home (Barry Took and Marty Feldman,
1965-1968, UK).


Between, vol. V, n. 9 (Maggio/ May 2015)
Irene Ranzato, “Gos Forbid, a Man”



the translation process, by decoding the sets of representations through
which language is imbued with cultural meaning for a certain
community.
      Gradually but steadily, the analysis of gayspeak2 has benefited, in
more recent years, from the intersection of other fields of studies.
Research has thus been extended from lexicon to other linguistic and
non-linguistic areas which may have ideological import: discourse
analysis, feminist theory and, in particular, queer studies and queer
linguistics. However, much remains to be explored, especially in the
field of audiovisuals where the relationship between natural dialogue
and scripted dialogue is crucial – scripted refers both to the original
text and to the translated dialogue.
      Analyses of speech traits can certainly be a valid starting point for
investigation, and even more useful is research in discourse-organising
and pragmatic strategies which in one place or another in the literature
have been suggested as characteristic of gay male talk and writing 3.
      More than in other areas of research, gayspeak and topics relative
to homosexuality appear to be sensitive to issues such as the time of
production of the text, the context, the patronage (i.e. distribution

      2 Gayspeak is a word coined by Joseph Hayes in a paper first published
in 1976. Hayes argues that homosexuals are America’s largest subculture and
that they have their own way of speaking, of which he identifies a number of
linguistic features (Hayes 2006). For an analysis of gayspeak and gay subjects
in AVT, see Ranzato 2012.
      3 Arnold Zwicky summarises some of the features that have been sug-

gested in the relevant literature as characteristic of gay male talk and writing:
subjective stance; irony, sarcasm (distancing, saying and not saying, "not tak-
ing seriously"); resistance, subversiveness; double/triple/etc. vision, meta-
commentary; embeddedness, discursiveness; open aggression; seductive-
ness; reversal, inversion (Zwicky 1997: 27-28). Also Keith Harvey has detect-
ed various features which go beyond the merely lexical (2004: 449-450) and
Hayes has explored the idea of “acting within acting” which, with the allu-
sions to film stars of the past or other iconic figures, can be considered a fea-
ture of gayspeak often portrayed in films and used stereotypically to depict
campier characters (2006: 71).


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                                           Between, vol. V, n. 9 (Maggio/May 2015)



companies and broadcasters), time of broadcast and type of audience,
that is to Skopos and reception related issues. Descriptive data can be
thus further investigated, for example, by studying the nature of the
TV channels that first commissioned the adaptations, to try and fathom
the implications related to the translation process. In this respect, the
descriptive study carried out by Josu Barambones Zubiria on TV
programming in the Basque Country is a very fruitful model to follow
(2009, 2012). TV channels in Italy, as in most countries, are highly
connoted, meaning that their programme selection often reveals their
political stance, and on many occasions they display very different
ideological imprints. In a clear narrowcasting strategy, some of them
broadcast mainly mainstream programmes, whilst some others are
aimed at more restricted and selected audiences, and are partially
thematic, focussing mostly on music, documentaries, fiction series and
so on. Data on the different TV channels could be useful to ascertain
the pressures and influences, if any, that the patronage exerts on
translators and adapters and it would also offer a detailed picture of
which modes of AVT are favoured by which stations and for which
audiovisual genres. In other words, it would help unravel the role
played by patronage (people, institutions, broadcasting companies, TV
channels, distributors, exhibitors) in this rewriting process. The double
identity of audiovisual works as cultural objects and as products of an
industry with the principal objective of attracting, pleasing, not
disturbing their intended audience and, above all, making profits, is an
area which needs further exploration, especially in the evaluation of
the attitude of the professionals who create the dubbed versions. In this
more complete picture, the role, the bearing and the composition of the
pool of ‘raw’ translators who are customarily the first providers of the
translated text in Italy should also be assessed, difficult as it is due to
their ‘uncertain’ professional status (Pavesi – Perego 2006).
     Reception studies, on the other hand, are another fruitful area of
investigation: the audience reception of the first episodes of a television
series, for example, can be compared to that of the following episodes,
in an attempt to trace a correlation to translation practices which can be
also diachronically meaningful.


                                                                                3
Irene Ranzato, “Gos Forbid, a Man”



     Considerations of the kind explained above have influenced the
analysis of the present case study.

    Six Feet Under: An Example of ‘Quality’ Television
      Quality TV and auteur television are the object of several
television studies and of critics’ reviews (see for example Edgerton and
Jones 2009; Jancovich – Lyons 2003; Leverette et al. 2008; McCabe –
Akass 2007; Nelson 2007). It is impossible to overlook the gap which
divides the often very high standard – in terms of script-writing,
acting, camera work, photography, art direction, costumes and editing
– of the original quality programmes imported from countries such as t
the USA and the UK, and the often much lower standard of fiction
shows produced by the Italian “neotelevision”4.
      According to Robert Thompson, quality programmes feature all
or most of these characteristics: a large ensemble cast; a memory; a new
genre formed by mixing old ones; a tendency to be literary and writer
based; textual self-consciousness; subject matter tending toward the
controversial; aspiration toward realism; a quality pedigree; attracting
an audience with blue-chip demographics (1996: 13-16). Drawing on
this taxonomy, the series which is the object of the present case study
certainly satisfies most of the desiderata for quality programming.
      From June 2001 to August 2005, the American channel HBO
broadcast the five seasons of Six Feet Under, a drama series created by

      4
        I use this term in the sense given to it by Umberto Eco (1985), to refer
to the crucial change that occurred in Italian television in the early 1980s due
to the arrival of “commercial” television as opposed to State, “public” televi-
sion. A new language, new codes and new objectives, which have had a pro-
found impact on the Italian society to this day, were introduced into what
used to be an essentially pedagogic format. In the field of serialised drama
fiction, in recent years, only three Italian products have been widely recog-
nised as quality programmes and have enjoyed a good international distribu-
tion: Il commissario Montalbano (Andrea Camilleri, 1999 – in production); Ro-
manzo criminale (Stefano Sollima, 2008-2010); Gomorra – La serie (Giovanni
Bianconi et al., 2014 – in production).


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                                               Between, vol. V, n. 9 (Maggio/May 2015)



Alan Ball, at the time an already established cinema script-writer5. The
series, which tackles morally compelling themes and is strongly tinged
with black humour, has been unanimously considered one of the best
TV shows of all time as well as having one of the best final episodes
(Cericola 2005; Poniewozik 2007; Bettridge 2009; Wilson 2009). The
media impact created by Six Feet Under was outstanding. It was the
first drama series commissioned by HBO6 after The Sopranos (David
Chase, 1999-2007) and, like its predecessor, it broke new ground in the
field of television series. It is – and it was conceived as being7 – ‘auteur’
television. Its bonds with the sociocultural context of the period in
which it was produced should not be overlooked:

        Six Feet Under, premiering only months before the terrorist
     attacks of September 11, 2001, chimed in with an elegiac cultural
     zeitgeist obsessed with mortality. Arguably, American culture has
     long been obsessed with death – with guns, violence, and killing.
     But September 11 ushered in a period of national introspection, a
     questioning of the fragility of our lives and how well we live them
     […]. No television series better captured this cultural
     mournfulness than Six Feet Under – the finality of death and what
     it means for the living. (Akass and McCabe 2008: 75)


     5
        Ball had already won an Academy Award for the screenplay of the
1999 acclaimed film by Sam Mendes, American Beauty.
      6 HBO, a US pay TV channel, is known for programming and produc-

ing pioneering fiction series - including Sex and The City (Darren Star, 1998-
2004), The Sopranos (David Chase, 1999-2007), The Wire (David Simon, 2002-
2008), In Treatment (developed by Rodrigo Garcia, 2008-2010); True Detective
(Nic Pizzolatto, 2014 – in production) – as well as influential drama films and
miniseries, such as Angels in America (Mike Nichols, 2003). It is considered
one of the main sites for what has come to be known as quality TV and its
productions are regarded as having a distinctive, cutting edge style (Feuer
2007; McCabe – Akass 2007; Edgerton – Jones 2009; Leverette et al. 2008).
      7 All the publicity created for Six Feet Under (trailers, adverts and so on)

shows the emphasis placed on the creative genius behind the show, Alan
Ball.


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Irene Ranzato, “Gos Forbid, a Man”



      Death is in fact the main theme of the series which centres on the
life of a family of undertakers, the Fisher, and on the complex
relationships between Ruth, the mother, who in the first episode
becomes the widow of Nathaniel senior, and her three children: David,
Nate and Claire.
      Although killed in an accident in the pilot episode, Nathaniel
senior is an important character, making what could be defined
‘Shakespearean’ appearances to his children after his death, in several
episodes in the course of the whole series. His widow, Ruth, is a
tormented but affectionate mother; she has grown up to repress her
emotions which sometimes surge out of control in unexpected
outbursts. She struggles hard to understand herself, her feelings, her
sexuality, and her own relationship with the rest of the family.
      The three Fisher children, in spite of being multi-faceted, complex
characters, each offer their creator the perfect means to delve into
contemporary, ‘sensitive’ social and personal issues. Nate (Nathaniel
Junior), the eldest son, has the vocation of a free spirit and struggles
hard with his commitment issues, both in his love relationships and in
his job at the funeral home, a paternal legacy he has tried in vain to run
away from. David is a tormented homosexual who stubbornly soldiers
on in a family business he does not particularly like. One of the main
themes of the series is how he learns to come out into the open and live
his sentimental life with freedom and contentment. Claire, the
youngest and only daughter, is an intelligent, aggressive and
vulnerable girl who tries to come to terms with her variation of the
heavy family burden through sentimental and sexual relationships,
experiments with drugs and artistic explorations.
      Many other characters join the Fishers along the way. Among
these, the most important are Federico, a Latin American employee
(and later partner) of the Fisher company, and Brenda, Nate’s
girlfriend and later wife, the character in Six Feet Under who is
probably most responsible for the sophisticated register of some of its
dialogues: in perennial conflict with her own dysfunctional family,
Brenda has inherited an intellectual, sarcastic, detached outlook on life
and relationships from her parents (a couple of somewhat irritating


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                                         Between, vol. V, n. 9 (Maggio/May 2015)



psychoanalysts), which is in sharp contrast with her boyfriend’s more
straightforward views.
      The sum of these contrasting personalities living unusual but
profoundly realistic lives adds up to a show which is at the same time
funny, deep, intelligent, moving and painfully true.
      Homosexuality is just one of the several issues explored in this
drama series, but one of the most diegetically important: all of the main
characters, sooner or later, have to come to terms with it. David is
followed in his progress from a closeted to an overt attitude towards
his homosexuality. His relationship with his original family and the
family that he creates with his boyfriend Keith gives the audience the
opportunity to fathom virtually all aspects of homosexuality in the
context of US contemporary culture, and the reactions of the other
characters offer us insights into different mentalities: from the
‘progressive’ ones of Brenda, Nate and Claire, for example, to the
initially more conservative and religion-conscious ones of characters
like Ruth and Federico.
      HBO broadcast Six Feet Under in its much vaunted 9 p.m. time
slot. It averaged a very good viewership although numbers decreased
steadily after the second season in spite of constantly good reviews. In
Italy, the national private channel Italia 1 broadcast the first three
seasons, after 11 pm, from 2004 to 2008. After a long break of three
years, the satellite pay TV channel Cult repeated the first seasons and
broadcast the two last, as yet unaired, seasons in 2008. Six Feet Under
did well for its time slot at the beginning on Italia 1, with 1,274,000
viewers watching the first episode of the first season and 848,000 the
second (Web 1). Audience numbers, however, rapidly decreased, and,
in 2008, the amount of people watching Six Feet Under on the 21st of
November were only 458,000 (Web 2).
      Luca Intoppa and Antonella Damigelli were the authors of the
Italian dialogues, the latter for season 3, and Fabrizio Temperini the
dubbing director.
      Despite the recent repeats on television and a fair amount of
publicity, the series has never become ‘mainstream’ and it is unknown



                                                                              7
Irene Ranzato, “Gos Forbid, a Man”



to a large portion of the Italian general public. It is, in fact, a ‘cult’
show, as the name of the pay TV channel which broadcast it.
     Given the nature of the problems the Fishers have to cope with
and in order to make them presentable at open casket funeral
viewings, I considered this programme a potentially problematic one
in terms of translation, not least because of the sexual and gender-
related issues which had never before been tackled in this upfront way
in any Italian fiction programme, original or translated.

                          Dubbing homosexuality
     The series, whose seasons 1 and 3 have been investigated for the
incidence of culture specific references (Ranzato 2015), also in relation
to homosexuality (Ranzato 2012), and for its intertextual allusions
(Ranzato 2014), and which has also been analysed for the translation
into Italian of its humorous features (Bucaria 2006), has been examined
here for the whole of its five seasons (63 episodes of 60 minutes, for
approximately 3780 minutes of programme) in order to detect and
analyse all the dialogues containing references to homosexuality and
gay lexicon. The original dialogues have then been contrasted with
their dubbed version into Italian.
     The data relative to the relevant occurrences are uneven, as the
following list shows:

                   Seasons           Number of dialogue exchanges
                                     containing references to homosexuality

                   Season 1          39
                   Season 2          8
                   Season 3          26
                   Season 4          21
                   Season 5          13

    There are diegetic reasons and reasons of “character revelation”
(Kozloff 2000: 33) to account for the remarkable differences in the


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density of occurrences. Season 1, which features the highest number of
dialogue exchanges dealing with homosexuality (39), establishes the
tone of the whole series, lays out its controversial themes and
introduces the characters, including one of the main ones, David, who
is portrayed in his struggles to come out. The reactions of the people
around him are also a prominent feature of season 1. It is natural then
that a great number of the dialogues revolves around the theme of
homosexuality. In season 2, on the other hand, which features the
smallest number of occurrences (8), David’s homosexuality has become
a part of the Fisher family’s everyday life, so there are fewer reasons to
make explicit references to it. At the same time, other fundamental
recurring themes, such as the discovery of Nate’s serious brain
condition, are introduced, and dialogues are constructed accordingly.
While season 3 and 4 see other important facts related to
homosexuality being elaborated (among others: Dave and Keith
explore alternative ways of living as a couple; Claire falls in love with a
boy who turns out to be gay and has a brief ‘exploratory’ relationship
with a lesbian), most of the dialogues of the final season, in which the
couple formed by David and Keith turns into a ‘standard’ family with
adopted children, focus on other important facts which affect the life of
the Fishers.
     For what concerns the Italian dubbing, it is remarkable to notice
that all of the instances in which the translation shows considerable
semantic departures from the original are contained in the first season.
     Skopos issues related to the demographic of the potential target
audience and the time of broadcast seem to be at the heart of some
translation strategies. In this sense, pilot episodes and first seasons in
general, as well as programmes broadcast in prime time, tend to be
more censored than others, probably because they have yet to build an
audience and, in the interest of the broadcasters, that audience has to
be as large as possible from the very beginning. The much lower
percentage in the use of more manipulative strategies, in the second to
the fifth series compared to the first one, seems to point in this
direction: once the prospective target audience has been established,
there is space for more latitude, which means in this case the freedom


                                                                                9
Irene Ranzato, “Gos Forbid, a Man”



to be more literal and closer to the original than constrained by the
assumed norms of the target language and culture.
     In the following paragraphs some relevant examples will be
discussed. The first one was chosen in spite of its apparent lack of
significant differences between the two versions:

                   Example 1: Season 1 Episode 5

                   CONTEXT: David, a practising Episcopalian, is
                   talking to a friendly priest outside the church
                   where he once used to go with his mother.

                   ORIGINAL FILM DIALOGUE
                   FATHER JACK: David, so glad to see you here.
                   It's always nice when someone comes back to the
                   fold.
                   DAVID: Oh, I've been going to church. I've just
                   been going to a different church.
                   FATHER JACK: Really? Which one?
                   DAVID: St. Stephen's.
                   FATHER JACK: In the Palisades?
                   DAVID: No, St. Stephen's in West Hollywood.

                   ITALIAN ADAPTATION
                   PADRE JACK: David, mi fa piacere rivederti. E’
                   bello quando una pecora torna all’ovile.
                   DAVID: Grazie, ma non è che ho smesso di
                   praticare. Andavo solo in un’altra chiesa.
                   PADRE JACK: Ah bè, in quale?
                   DAVID: A Santo Stefano.
                   PADRE JACK: Quella sulla scogliera?
                   DAVID: No, Santo Stefano a West Hollywood.

                   BACK TRANSLATION
                   FATHER JACK: David, I’m pleased to see you
                   again. It's nice when a sheep comes back to the
                   fold.



10
                                               Between, vol. V, n. 9 (Maggio/May 2015)



               DAVID: Thanks, but it’s not that I stopped
               practising. I've just been going to another church.
               FATHER JACK: Oh well, which one?
               DAVID: St. Stephen's.
               FATHER JACK: The one on the cliff?
               DAVID: No, St. Stephen's in West Hollywood.

      This is an example of an adaptation which fails to have the same
impact on the target audience as it has on the source audience. West
Hollywood is a town near Los Angeles which is well-known, in the
USA, for its social justice legislation. It was, among other records, the
first city to create same-sex domestic partnership registration and
various related benefits for its residents. As a result, according to a
2002 demographic analysis (Web 3), 41% of the city’s population is
made up of gay or bisexual men. Father Jack’s facial reaction to David’s
words in the scene reveals that he is well aware of the implied meaning
of his change of church. A meaning that would not have been
perceived by the vast majority of Italians for whom the name of West
Hollywood, transferred with a loan, would only evoke cinema-related
images. In this case, as in the following one, it could be argued that the
adaptation reveals a lack of awareness of gay-related themes. More
broadly speaking, it reveals an ignorance of some aspects of the source
culture, which have not been widely exported. The same area of Los
Angeles is omitted in the next exchange:

               Example 2: Season 1 Episode 8

               CONTEXT: David is mad at Federico who did a
               job for another company although he is a Fishers’
               employee. Nate is trying to find reasons to excuse
               him.

               ORIGINAL FILM DIALOGUE
               NATE: Stop being such a drama queen.




                                                                                   11
Irene Ranzato, “Gos Forbid, a Man”



                   DAVID: Stop acting like you’re honorary mayor of
                   West Hollywood all of a sudden. He lied to our
                   faces.

                   ITALIAN ADAPTATION
                   NATE: Non fare il melodrammatico.
                   DAVID: E tu non fare l’avvocato delle cause perse
                   per difendere la carogna.

                   BACK TRANSLATION
                   NATE: Don’t be so melodramatic.
                   DAVID: And you, don’t act like the lawyer of lost
                   causes to defend the rascal.

      The dialogue is also relevant for its treatment of a feature of
gayspeak. According to Hayes, the richest features of social gayspeak
are found in the lexicon, particularly in compound constructions (2006:
71). In this sense, the lexical item ‘queen’ is possibly the most widely
employed stem word for building compounds used for a limitless
series of images to describe sexual preferences (i.e. ‘size queen’),
subculture types (‘queen of tarts’, a pimp for hustlers), to make fun of a
man’s hobbies or interests (‘poker queen’ for someone who likes
playing cards) or as an all-purpose term of derogation (‘Queen Mary’
for someone fat). Arguably, the elimination of the ‘queen’ compound
in this dialogue reveals, even more than the conscious will to replace a
gay connotation, the lack of an appropriate term in the target language.
The relative poverty of the Italian gay lexicon as compared to the
richness of the corresponding English terminology is a fact. The Italian
culture has opened up to homosexual themes much more slowly than
the Anglo-Saxon world. One of the first consequences of this state of
affairs is that the language of homosexuals has long remained in Italy
the language of a ghetto and still today the relatively poor lexicon
available is an objective obstacle even for the most unprejudiced
translator. Sometimes, a poor translation might not be due necessarily




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                                               Between, vol. V, n. 9 (Maggio/May 2015)



to a tendency to conscious manipulation but simply to the lack of a
lexical counterpart (Ranzato 2012)8.
     David’s original repartee in the above dialogue mentions the same
town of West Hollywood (practically an area of Los Angeles) which
appeared in the earlier example. On this occasion, the reference has
been eliminated. By mentioning the ‘mayor of West Hollywood’, David
is reacting to a series of gay-friendly comments that Nate has been
making for the whole episode, undoubtedly to show his brother,
whom he has just discovered to be homosexual, his open-mindedness
about the subject. Earlier on, Nate had in fact made this comment to
David:

               Example 3: Season 1 Episode 8

               CONTEXT: Nate is encouraging David as he
               realised there’s someone who clearly fancies him.

               ORIGINAL FILM DIALOGUE
               NATE: That kid wants to jump your bones. Oh,
               come on, David. I watch Will and Grace. I've got
               gay-dar.




     8
       The words ‘gay’, ‘transgender’, ‘coming out’, ‘drag queen’, are now
words recognisable by most Italian people, but they are just about the only
words of the homosexual jargon to have entered mainstream language. In
the case of the English language, as early as 1941, Gershon Legman included
146 terms in his American glossary which contained «only words and
phrases current in American slang, argot, and colloquial speech since the
First World War, and particularly during the period between 1930 and 1940»
(2006: 19). According to the author, the glossary was far from exhaustive,
though it was part of a longer list of 329 terms – the selection being words
which were used exclusively by homosexuals. A great number of these
words are now part of standard English or are slang words used also by the
general public. The Italian lexicon of homosexuality lacks the inventiveness
of English, shies away from neologisms and prefers to resort to borrowing.


                                                                                   13
Irene Ranzato, “Gos Forbid, a Man”



                   ITALIAN ADAPTATION
                   NATE: Lo sconosciuto ti vuole saltare addosso.
                   Andiamo, sono un uomo di mondo e ho il gay-
                   radar.

                   BACK TRANSLATION
                   NATE: The someone you don’t know wants to
                   jump on you. Come on, I’m a man of the world
                   and I’ve got gay-radar.

     Although the content of the line does not change in its substance,
the elimination of the culture specific reference sensibly alters the
effective lightness of tone. It is ironic that the sitcom Will & Grace
(David Kohan, Max Mutchnick, 1998-2006, USA) – a successful, 10-
year-long series whose male main character is gay – was in fact never
heavily censored in its dubbing for Italian television.
     The following example shows a more subtly ideological
translation of a gayspeak feature:

                   Example 4: Season 5 Episode 1

                   CONTEXT: Nate and David are discussing
                   Claire’s love life.

                   ORIGINAL FILM DIALOGUE
                   DAVID: She should have stayed with her nice gay
                   boyfriend.
                   NATE: That guy was an asshole.

                   ITALIAN ADAPTATION
                   DAVID: Era meglio se rimaneva con il gay tutto
                   sommato.
                   NATE: Quello sì che era un coglione.

                   BACK TRANSLATION
                   DAVID: It would have been better if she had
                   stayed with the gay, all things considered.


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                                           Between, vol. V, n. 9 (Maggio/May 2015)



               NATE: That one was an asshole indeed.

     The word ‘gay’ is used as an adjective in the original dialogue and
as a noun in the Italian translation. The use of ‘gay’ adjective versus
‘gay’ noun has long been an object of discussion in queer linguistics.
As Zwicky notes, «many who are comfortable with the former are not
with the latter» (1997: 22). The well-grounded objection is that the
nouns denote an all-embracing, essential property, while adjectives
denote one characteristic among many (ibid.). The choice of using the
word as a noun in Italian reveals ideological undertones.
     In other instances, references to homosexuality are suppressed,
either more subtly, as in the next example 5, or more blatantly, as in the
following, already commented instance (Ranzato 2012: 378-379):

               Example 5: Season 1 Episode 8

               CONTEXT: Nate and Federico are talking about
               one of David’s typical character traits.

               ORIGINAL DIALOGUE
               FEDERICO: Your brother's got a bug up his ass
               about cleanliness.
               NATE: I know. When we used to play G. I. Joes,
               he always wanted to give his a shower.

               ITALIAN ADAPTATION
               FEDERICO: Tuo fratello è stato sempre maniaco
               della pulizia.
               NATE: Quando giocavamo ai cowboy si faceva
               sempre due docce.

               BACK TRANSLATION
               FEDERICO: Your brother has always been a
               maniac about cleanliness.
               NATE: When we played cowboys he always had
               two showers.



                                                                               15
Irene Ranzato, “Gos Forbid, a Man”



     In the original text, Federico’s and Nate’s exchange of opinions
about David’s love for cleanliness is skillfully used to serve as a nod to
the audience who is already privy to a piece of information about him
that the two characters do not yet share: David’s insistence on giving
his G.I. Joe a shower was probably not only a sign of his love for
cleanliness. Cleanliness, however, is the Italian David’s sole interest: so
much so that when he played cowboys he always had two showers.
     This is only a more subtler way of superimposing a
heteronormative discourse on a homosexual one, a tendency of the
adapters in translating the features of gayspeak which is more evident
in the first season of the series and which, as I have previously noted
(Ranzato 2012: 378-379), is particularly evident in the following
instance:

                   Example 6: Season 1 Episode 1

                   CONTEXT: Ruth is talking about her husband’s
                   new purchase to her son David, a homosexual
                   young man who, in this pilot episode, has not yet
                   ‘come out’.

                   ORIGINAL FILM DIALOGUE
                   RUTH: I think your father is having some sort of
                   midlife crisis.
                   DAVID: It would have made so much more sense
                   to invest in re-paneling for the chapel or adding
                   coffee bars to the slumber rooms.
                   RUTH: Well, I’d much rather he buy himself a
                   fancy new hearse than leave me for a younger
                   woman, or a woman my age for that matter, or,
                   heaven forbid, a man, like my cousin Hannah’s
                   husband did. God sure has dealt that woman
                   some blows in this life.

                   ITALIAN ADAPTATION




16
                                            Between, vol. V, n. 9 (Maggio/May 2015)



               RUTH: Tuo padre ci teneva, si è fatto un regalo
               per la crisi di mezza età.
               DAVID: Era meglio investire per ridrappeggiare la
               cappella o mettere le macchinette del caffè nella
               camera ardente.
               RUTH: È comunque sempre meglio che si sfoghi
               con un’auto nuova piuttosto che tradendomi con
               una ragazzina o con una donna della mia età. Gli
               uomini come il marito di mia cugina Hannah il
               cielo li dovrebbe castigare. Il Signore ha riservato
               dure prove a quella povera donna.

               BACK TRANSLATION
               RUTH: Your father wanted it very much, he
               bought himself a present for his midlife crisis.
               DAVID: It would have been better to invest in re-
               paneling for the chapel or adding coffee bars to
               the slumber rooms.
               RUTH: Anyway it’s always better that he satisfies
               himself with a new car than betray me with a
               young girl or a woman my age. Heaven should
               punish men like my cousin Hannah’s husband.
               God has reserved that poor woman some hard
               trials.

      Ruth’s lines in this exchange have been translated in such a way
as to alter their meaning radically: no reference to the homosexuality of
her cousin’s husband is made in Italian. He is in fact described as a
heterosexual womaniser. My contention is that this kind of departure
from the original meaning was chosen by the adapters in the attempt to
sanitise the script in order to attract, in airing the pilot episode of the
series, a wider ‘general’ audience. A purpose which clashed with the
sophisticated, and in a way more élitarian standard of the original
audiovisual text.




                                                                                17
Irene Ranzato, “Gos Forbid, a Man”




          Conclusions: Dismantling the Gay Imaginary
      Six Feet Under dealt with ‘sensitive’ issues in a way which was
unprecedented for a television series broadcast in Italy on a public
channel. Subjects related to death (Ranzato 2015) and homosexuality,
in particular, had never been so openly displayed and delved into on
any television show before9. The adaptation into Italian of Six Feet
Under shows how the two concepts of manipulation and censorship are
sometimes separated by a very thin line. It is difficult not to interpret
this adaptation as aimed at mitigating and ultimately eliminating
sensitive references. More instances could be given for a censoring
attitude that is more evident in the first season of the series. Television
series need time to ‘adjust’ and find their own target audience, in the
original as well as in their translated reincarnation. This has also been
the case with Six Feet Under whose Italian adaptation, with time, partly
evolved to reflect more closely the reality of its main themes and its
crude and sophisticated language.
      Nonetheless, in the whole of its five seasons, the Italian rewriting
never fails to convey the feeling that the purpose of the Italian adapters
has been to produce a more reassuring programme, one that would
lose its more sophisticated features and would dilute the more
‘dangerous’ contents. The result is that of a series that wants to be more
palatable to the target audience than it was to the original audience,
which entails sacrificing some of the most intelligent dialogue
exchanges. Overall, this is a rather sad outcome for one of the most
acclaimed examples of ‘auteur’ television.



      The more specifically gay series Queer as Folk (Russell T. Davies, 1999-
      9

2000, UK) was cancelled after much controversy, before ever being aired, by
the public channel La7, considered one of the most progressive in Italy. It
was later broadcast in 2002, in the late evening/night, by the pay TV channel
Gay TV. Its slightly more sanitised American version (Ron Cowen, Daniel
Lipman, 2000-2005) was broadcast in 2006-2007 by the pay TV channel Jim-
my.



18
                                           Between, vol. V, n. 9 (Maggio/May 2015)



      It is my contention that one of the most telling areas that displays
the Italian adapters’ attitude towards this series is their bold, censoring
handling of contents and words related to homosexuality. It is much
more than just a matter of sanitisation: it is the purposeful dismantling
of a network of associations which in the original text overtly relates to
a gay imaginary. In the worst cases, homosexuality is not even
acknowledged and it is translated into a heterosexual and normalising
lexicon, through substitutions and eliminations.
      The original Six Feet Under is notable for its clarity of intent. The
series is clearly aimed at cultivated, liberal-minded viewers and does
not make compromises in order to attract a more general audience. It
does not pretend to be what it cannot be, that is, a mainstream product.
The authors of the Italian version seemed to have been unsure of what
was the best course of action to take was and although the series
slowly tried to adjust to its intended target audience by keeping more
literal to the original, there is ample evidence that the translators did
their best not to miss any opportunity to appeal to a more general,
broader public. This manipulative operation has also linguistic
consequences: the idiolect of a speech community, gayspeak in this
case, is betrayed and its original, creative traits neutralised in a vain
attempt to meet mainstream taste.




                                                                               19
Irene Ranzato, “Gos Forbid, a Man”




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Irene Ranzato, “Gos Forbid, a Man”



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                                     Sitography
Web 1:
“Ascolti:    Bonolis      il   più   visto      in    prima      serata”,
   www.pubblicitaitalia.it/news/Media-e-
   Multimedia/Televisione/ascolti-bonolis-il-piu-visto-in-prima-
   serata_02100354.aspx (2004), online (last access 18/01/2015).
Web 2:
www.telesimo.it/news/2008/ascolti-17--23-novembre-2008.html (2008),
   online (last access 18/01/2015).
Web 3:
www.weho.org/Modules/ShowDocument.aspx?documentid=623               (last
  access 07/03/2013).



                                     Filmography
American Beauty, Dir. Sam Mendes, USA, 1999.
Angels in America, Dir. Mike Nichols, USA, 2003.
Gomorra – La serie, Created by Giovani Bianconi - Stefano Bises - Leo-
     nardo Fasoli - Ludovica Rampoldi - Roberto Saviano, Italy, 2014-in
     production).
Il commissario Montalbano, Created by Andrea Camilleri, Italy, 1999-in
     production.
In Treatment, Developed by Rodrigo Garcia, USA, 2008-2010.
Queer as Folk, Created by Russell T. Davies, UK, 1999-2000.
Queer as Folk, Created by Ron Cowen - Daniel Lipman, USA, 2000-2005.
Romanzo criminale, Created by Stefano Sollima, Italy, 2008-2010.
Round the Home, Created by Marty Feldman - Barry Took, UK, 1965-
     1968.


22
                                           Between, vol. V, n. 9 (Maggio/May 2015)



Six Feet Under, Created by Alan Ball, USA, 2001-2005.
The Sopranos, Created by David Chase, USA, 1999-2007.
The Wire, Created by David Simon, USA, 2002-2008.
True Detective, Created by Nic Pizzolatto, USA, 2014-in production.
Will & Grace, Created by David Kohan - Max Mutchnick, USA, 1998-
    2006.



                             The Author
Irene Ranzato

       Irene Ranzato is a researcher in English language and translation
at Sapienza University of Rome, where she teaches audiovisual and
intersemiotic translation for BA and MA courses. She has a PhD in
Translation Studies (Imperial College London): her research focused on
the translation of culture specific references in dubbing for television.
She has written extensively on themes related to audiovisual
translation: censorship and manipulation in dubbing, culture specific
references, the translation of regional and social varieties of English.
She is also interested in film and television studies and in theories of
adaptation.

      Email: irene.ranzato@libero.it



                               The paper

Date sent: 15/01/2015
Date accepted: 01/04/2015
Date published: 15/05/2015




                                                                               23
Irene Ranzato, “Gos Forbid, a Man”



                             How to quote this paper

      Ranzato, Irene, “‘God Forbid, a Man!’: Homosexuality in a Case
of Quality TV”, Censura e auto-censura, Eds. A. Bibbò, S. Ercolino, M.
Lino Between, V.9 (2015), http://www.betweenjournal.it/




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