"Omit: a reference to the unspeakable vive of the Greeks". Maurice's audiovisual journey in Italy

Ever since its appearance in 1971, Forster’s Maurice has enjoyed remarkable transnational and transmedial attention, prompting fierce debate and conflicting interpretations. In its simplest reading, Maurice is a story of homosexual love in Edwardian England, a spatial-temporal setting in which “the unspeakable vice of the Greeks” (Forster 2005: 42) was punished with hard labour. The novel was published posthumously and signalled Forster’s coming out. It was, however, greeted with luke-warm critical acclaim (Sutton and Tsai 2020: 2), dismissed as sub-Forsterian (Ivory 1999 in Monk 2020: 233) and eschewed by exponents of the gay-liberation movement who viewed Forster’s decision to publish Maurice after his death as a betrayal of the gay community (Hodges and Hunter 1974). As queer theory emerged, Maurice was reappraised in all its queer permutations in contrast with heteronormativity (Martin and Piggfort 1997). Simultaneously, and perhaps ironically, despite Thatcher’s clause 28 , Maurice also started to gain ground in popular culture, not least of all due to Merchant and Ivory’s film adaptation. Less than two decades after its debut in the literary world, Maurice became the second movement of their Forsterian symphonic trilogy, which opened with A Room with a View and later concluded with Howards End (Ingersol 2012). The fortunes of Maurice in Italy are less well-known. Although Forster considered Italy a haven for homosexuals, by the time Maurice was published the peninsular may have become a less tolerant space. Nevertheless, the novel was translated by Marcella Bonsanti in 1972, while the dubbed version of the film was released in 1988. Building on previous research on the linguistic representation of homosexuality across Italian-English lingua-cultures in AVT products (Filmer 2020, Ranzato 2012, 2019, Sandrelli 2016), the central question of this paper engages with cross-cultural tensions surrounding the verbal references to “the unspeakable vice”. Two scenes will be analysed combining perspectives from Translation Studies and Literary Studies; Maurice’s second visit to Doctor Lasker Jones and the last encounter between Maurice and Clive before Maurice’s departure. Our analysis highlights, on the one hand, the ideological consequences that emerge in translating the expression “share with” that Alec and Maurice use to refer to love making and, on the other, the lingua-cultural interference present in the Italian film’s adapted dialogue, which seems to pinpoint palpable religious isotopy.