testi e linguaggi 8/2014 217 Marlene NourbeSe Philip’s Zong!: There Is No Telling This Story, It Must Be Translated by Linda Barone, Roberto Masone 1 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 coher- ence 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 experi- ences to whom postcolonial is not. 1 Introduction Starting from the very general assumption that translation should aim at «the replacement of textual material in one language (sl) by equivalent textual material in another language (tl)» 2 and «reproducing in the receptor language the closest natural equivalent of the source-language message» 3 , some considerations on “equivalence” or “equivalent effect” and on the concept of “faithfulness” in translation are needed. Nida and Taber argue that only a linguistic translation can be considered “faithful”, because it «is one which only contains elements which can be directly derived from the st wording, avoiding any kind of explanatory interpolation or cultural adjustment which can be justified on this basis» 4 . Other types of translation which include more than just linguistic elements push the target text away from faithfulness and make the concept of equivalence more complicated. Nida 5 distinguishes formal equivalence from dynamic equi- valence and this binary classification bears a resemblance to the categorization of semantic and communicative translation made by Newmark. The former aims to «render, as closely as the semantic and syntactic structures of the second language allow, the exact contextual