Marlene NourbeSe Philip’s Zong!: There Is No Telling This Story, It Must Be Translated

Abstract

Inspired by the text of the legal decision Gregson vs Gilbert, known as “the Zong case”, Marlene NourbeSe Philip develops in Zong! a chain of poems which tell the murder of 150 African slaves in order to collect insurance money. The unconventional layout of the book, the staggering structure and the whimsical writing strategies adopted by the author constitute a very challenging task for the translator. In an attempt to translate this book into Italian, or into any language other than English, the translator becomes soon aware of the few chances to preserve the sound, form and linguistic coherence of the st, losing the “postcolonial clash” between Standard English and African languages and the evocative attitude determined by wordplays and polyvocality throughout the book. The aim of this work is to show how a (not the, because it is only one among the many possibilities) translation/ transformation of this challenging textus, can lead or not to a text which successfully combines visual writing and creativity with historical facts, in order to broaden the geography of postcolonial experiences to whom postcolonial is not.