LC#8: Lost in Translation
LC#8: Lost in Translation
Vices and virtues of Italian dubbing.
This edition of letdown comedy may be the most personal one yet. I’m not going to whine about clubs being closed or anything like that anymore, but I’ll share a few thoughts about the way Italian dubbing shaped my relationship not only with comedy, but with my idea of what it means to be Italian. Hopefully the compaesani among you can relate, the others (and I mean the anglophones especially) might be curious to know what it feels like to consume cultural products that were pre-digested in ways that do not always make them more nutritious. Scroll, swipe, do your thing.
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I’m not entirely sure when it was, but at some point in my life I became aware of it: Italian dubbing was seriously fucking with me. Maybe not in a major way, but definitely in a consistent, sneaky fashion. I’m pretty sure it was watching the original version of A Fish Called Wanda that did it.
While the movie I had enjoyed during a school trip years earlier featured an Italian-speaking Kevin Klein seducing Jamie Lee Curtis by whispering to her in mock-Spanish, the real one had the same actor reciting a humorously random sequence of Italian words. I don’t think I knew Italian was considered a sexy language before that moment, but another reason it was relatively mind-blowing is it revealed some of the national stereotypes that inform our cultural adaptations. It showed to me where Italian identity stood on the international seduction scale, placing it in more or less flattering relations with others: apparently it was more sensual than English, but Spanish was even more Italian than Italian. Turns out dubbing is all about that.
Although technically it started in California, Italian dubbing was born in the 1930s, under full-blown Fascism. Subtitles wouldn’t have worked back then, since Italians did not really speak a common language, but rather a jigsaw of dialects; dubbing, then, did not only play its part in consolidating Italian as a national language, but it was also an effective ideological vehicle for the regime. Mussolini was famously big on language and its performative potential (movie voice-overs from that time are so comically stentorious and Duce-like an Italian comedian made a whole parody series and a feature spin-off about it) and he definitely wasn’t shy on Italianizing anything that threatened to corrupt his brand of Roman-nostalgic grandeur. To make one very significant example, it was through dubbing that Mussolini enforced the purging of “lei” (a 3rd-person, feminine pronoun used in place of the 2nd-person singular “tu” in formal situations) and encouraged its replacement with the less effeminate “voi” (a 2nd-person, gender-neutral plural). The power move did not really stick, and “voi” kind of died out, but these pronoun shenanigans still cause a glitch in the cultural matrix every once in a while.
Another big moment of reckoning in my relationship with dubbing was when I learned that Fran from The Nanny (“La Tata”, in Italian) was Jewish. The sit-com I watched as a kid was about an unrefined yet big-hearted Italian-American nanny who won over a family of stuck up millionaires - that Francesca (not Fran) watched Mike Bongiorno on TV and bickered with her aunt Assunta, who waxed nostalgic about their family back in Frosinone; the real Fran, I later found out, was a Jewish woman from Queens who bickered with her mom with a strong New York accent. Occasional clues were given when she talked about visiting a kibbutz in Israel at some point, but other than that the whole plot was green-white-and-red-washed to perfection. The adaptation is hardly responsible for the lack of Jewish representation in the Italian pop-cultural mainstream (if anything, it was a missed chance), but considering the Fascist roots of dubbing it’s especially bitter that the entire cultural Jewishness of a leading character had to be written out. It’s also sadly ironic that one of the few YouTube clips from the Italian version that were short enough to post here is a scene where the dubbing completely overrides the relationship between the two main characters, altering a crucial shift from “boss and nanny” to “lovers”. In the original version of the sit-com, Mr Sheffield normally calls the nanny “Miss Fines”, so when he finally calls her “Fran” it is a big deal; in the Italian version, he has always called her “Francesca”, so it is her who is finally allowed to change the way she addresses him from the more respectful “lei” to the familiar “tu”. The result is similar, but it changes the power dynamics between the two characters (and it does so in a gendered way, incidentally or not).
If the hiccup described above echoes the historically fraught tension between dubbing and gender pronouns, this clip from The Simpsons illustrates the importance of local stereotypes in Italian adaptations. The sequence shows Homer trying to distract Groundskeeper Willie by pretending to be from the same place as him - in the original version that would be Scotland, but in Italian the harsh weather and sheep-heavy landscapes of the British region are re-territorialized onto the sunnier (yet equally sheep-heavy) island of Sardinia. The related stereotypes (and some of the phonetics) are as close as they could possibly get, and for all I’ve said about Italian dubbing so far there is no doubt the series in general is exemplary of its excellence. While the missing original context was lost on Italian viewers, professionals like the legendary Tonino Accolla (who, apart from Homer Simpson, voiced actors as diverse as Eddie Murphy and Kenneth Branagh) at least made sure to fill the void with material that was equally rich and culturally resonant. At times they even threw something extra in: I remember a sequence in Coming to America, when a character turns around to enter a building and goes up a few steps on a stair for just a couple seconds - in the original version he says nothing, the Italian dubbers instead squeezed in an extra joke when the character is facing away from the camera.
When you grow up in Italy, dubbing is such a standard practice that you hardly question it. Still, despite many say Italian dubbing is the best in the world (and it’s not just Italians), it’s hard to go back to it once you get used to hearing original voices, or even just reading subtitles like they do in so many other countries. I remember how fascinated I was in the late 1990s, when MTV Italia started broadcasting and airing American shows with subtitles only. In those years I was mostly learning English from video games and chatting online (I had a 33.6kbit modem), and being exposed to more foreign content definitely helped me improve it. Instead of leading to more subtitles and less dubbing, however, in the following years both MTV and video game distributors started adapting more and more stuff into Italian. It made sense, but it was also a missed opportunity: dubbing keeps people from learning other languages, and it also penalizes original content. When everything is in Italian, Italian products have to compete with higher-budget blockbusters from overseas, often failing to be appreciated for their local references, linguistic performance, and originality. After living abroad for 10 years, I for one definitely enjoy them much more.
As for comedy, the current Italian stand-up scene (and all related TV shows and podcasts) could only have happened in a post-adaptation world. Arguably, in fact, significant change was sparked by two more or less simultaneous events, both of which had to do with gate-keeping and adaptation: the fall from grace of Daniele Luttazzi (an influential comic and unofficial ambassador of US-style comedy in Italy, who around 2010 was called out for stealing a bunch of jokes from foreign comedians and shamelessly incorporating them into his shows) and the grassroots popularization of American and English stand-up comedians online, spearheaded by the efforts of a subtitle-making community called ComedySubs. More recently, when I interviewed the first three Italian stand-ups who made it to Netflix (for this article), I was not surprised to hear them credit ComedySubs as a big influence.
Italian dubbing remains important: it gives millions the opportunity to encounter cultural products they might never experience otherwise, often maintaining a high level of artistic sophistication. Nevertheless, the more you experience outside of it the more you find yourself estranged from it. In my experience, this is a lot like the very notion of being “Italian”.