Statement of Facts
Outline of Events Related to the Unauthorised Translation of Zong! by Renata Morresi and Benway Series Press
lives own their facts/…facts own their lives… (Zong! #22)
1. in 2016 Renata Morresi, wrote to me stating that she was interested in translating Zong! into Italian. Renata Morresi stated that she did not have a publisher. I advised Renata Morresi that she would have to get permission from the publishers, Wesleyan University Press (WUP). At the time it appeared to be something of a passion project and assumed that she would be in touch with me once she had a publisher. I heard nothing more from Renata Morresi until June 11, 2021 when I received congratulations from Benway Series Press on publication of a translation of Zong! by Renata Moressi.
2. In 2020 WUP sold the translation rights to Benway Series Press for $150. WUP did not inform me that the rights had been sold nor did they put me in touch with the translator Renata Morresi or Benway Series Press.
3. At least five people, including representatives of the Canada Council which funded the translation in the amount of some $13,000, have been involved in this Italian translation of Zong!, all of whom are white, and yet no one thought it necessary to consult with me, the Black and African-descended author of the said work, which engages with the transatlantic slave trade and which, as plainly stated on the cover—as told to the author by Setaey Adamu Boateng—involved Ancestral voices.
4. In addition to this egregious act of negligence regarding process and common standards within the translation community, the translator, Renata Morresi, failed to respect the foundational and organizing principle of Zong!, which is that no word or cluster of words can come directly below another: each word, fragment or word cluster is seeking the space above to breathe as those massacred 240 years ago this November were not able to breathe. It is this restraint and conceptual rigour that gives the work its distinctive shape.
5. On p.203 of the Notanda that appears at the end of Zong!, I state: “every word or word cluster is seeking a space directly above within which to fit itself and in so doing falls into relation with others either above, below, or laterally. This is the governing principle and adds a strongly visual quality to the work.” Renata Moressi has ignored this principle.
5. In ignoring this principle Renata Moressi is in breach of the Translators’ Code established by the Federation of International Translators, in particular paras. 4 and 11. These read as follows:
4. Every translation shall be faithful and render exactly the idea and form of the original, this fidelity constituting both a moral and legal obligation for the translator. (my emphasis)
11. Being a “secondary” author, the translator is required to accept special obligations with respect to the author of the original work.
6. Renata Morresi and Benway Series Press are also in breach of my moral rights as an author and, in particular, as regards a work that engaged Ancestral protocols and obligations.
7. Since June 11, 2021, when I first received notice of the publication of the translation by Benway Series, I have been making my concerns known to all the parties concerned, Renata Morresi, Benway Series Press, WUP and the Canada Council. I called for the work to be destroyed, an act which publishers do find necessary to do from time to time. Despite my making my concerns and opposition to the publication known to everyone, no one listened to me or took my concerns seriously.
8. On June 18, 2021, Benway Series Press wrote to me and did agree with me that they and the translator should have been in contact with me earlier: “You are entirely right when you say that we, Benway Series and the translator, should have contacted you earlier.”
9. They excuse themselves as follows: “Although the project has been ongoing since at least 2016, the great bulk of the translation, the editing and the painstaking proof-reading of your book was essentially done during the pandemic, among great personal and professional difficulties, and on a very tight schedule.” The translation appears to have essentially been a pandemic project.
10. In late August 2021 I received an email from WUP informing me that Benway was intending to go ahead with the distribution of the translation because they had told the Canada Council that they would publish the work by June 2021.
11. On September 1, 2021, I informed all the parties that unless I had a confirmation that Benway would destroy the translation and remove all mention of it from their website, I would make the situation public.
12. On September 1, 2021, WUP, via email, finally agreed that the translation did not follow the organizing principal of the original and agreed that the text should be destroyed and expressed hope that Benway Series would agree.
13. In response to these events WUP has changed its policies concerning informing authors of sale of licenses and has set a minimum fee of $500 for print runs under 1,000 books.
13. On September 1, 2021, via email, Renata Morresi continued to assert that the texts were exactly the same except for a few places where there was some overlap: “I invite everybody who hasn’t had the chance to do it yet to compare the original and its translation page by page: they will realize that the Italian version follows the layout of the original in almost every instance. Yes, in a few instances a word or a cluster of words slightly superimposes the word or cluster of words in the previous line, for the space of a character or two….”
14. Morresi’s statement is inaccurate, since there are many, many pages where the organizing principle is not followed.
15. Morresi also states in this letter that she reached out to me for “advice and collaboration more than once.” (Her emphasis) I have one request from Renata Morresi in 2016 referred to in para. 1 above. There was a failed attempt made by a third party to speak with her after the Benway publication.
16. I did not respond to Morresi because she had not contacted Wesleyan and did not have a contract. Morresi is clearly of the opinion that because she was interested in translating Zong!, I should have made myself available to work with her with no contract or financial recompense for my time. This is a form of exploitation and entitlement.
17. Benway Series Press did not reply to my September 1, 2021 email.
18. On September 7, 2012, I wrote once again to Benway concerning their failure to respond to my September 1, 2021 letter. In response Benway Series wrote that “(d)oubts about the book’s quality and graphic rendering… cannot be attributed to identity differences or presumed essences.”
19. Neither Renata Morresi nor Benway Series Press appear interested in the fact that in allowing the words to breathe on the page, the experience of the Zong massacre by drowning—the content, if you will, has been braided into the formal and textual properties of the work; in other words the form of Zong! is also the content and the content the form. Benway Series and Renata Morresi appear more concerned with what the former describes as the “graphic rendering” of the text, and the latter with how the text can be used to further the discussion of racism in Italy. Neither Benway Series nor Renata Morresi appear concerned with the reparative intent of the work for Black and African-descended people; indeed Benway dismisses those as “identity differences” and “presumed essences.” They do not consider Zong! a work of mourning or an honouring of the Ancestors, which it was written as. For the most part, they are more interested in how Zong! can kick start a discussion on race related to the migrant crisis in Italy today and be used to challenge a Fascist legacy.
20. Among the layers of erasure enacted by Benway Series is the fact that although they are a bilingual press and all their other books listed on their site are bilingual, Zong! is the only book to appear that is only in Italian.
21. Most recently Benway Series has publicly accused me on their website and on my FB page of racial essentialism; tribalism; authoritarianism & totalitarianism; North American privilege and colonialism.
Correspondence
Timeline
2016: Renata Morresi contacts NourbeSe regarding wish to write Italian translation of Zong!
June 11 2021: Benway announces Italian translation of Zong!
June 11 2021: NourbeSe asks Suzanna (Wesleyan) and Benway Series to be informed of translation process, contracts and rights
June 14 2021: Suzanna Tamminen confirms Benway signed contract with Wesleyan for $150
June 15 2021: After assessment of text, NourbeSe informs Benway Seies translation is unacceptable
June 16: Benway explains process, CCA funding and anonymous peer-review
June 21: Renata Morresi contacts NourbeSe
July 1: Renata Morresi contacts NourbeSe
July 8: Suzanna Tamminen confirms outside reader
August 30: Suzanna Tamminen contacts NourbeSe
September 1: NourbeSe writes to Benway to inform them of her opposed to publication, informs them she will go public
September 1: Suzanna Tamminen agrees project should be pulled
September 1: Renata Morresi contacts NourbeSe
September 7: NourbeSe inquires to Benway Series; asks why they have not responded to request to pull book
September 9: Benway Series responds to NourbeSe
September 9: NourbeSe contacts Benway for name of Canada Council contact
September 9: Benway responds to NourbeSe; telling her CCA contact remains anonymous to applicants
Correspondence
May 31, 2016, Renata Morresi contacted M. NourbeSe Philip:
Dear M. NourbeSe Philip,
I am so happy to hear you find our translation project interesting: it certainly is an amazing job and more than once I happen to wake up in the middle of the night with a word, an expression, a ‘solution’ to some linguistic question haunting me (sometimes it was just the ghost of a solution, sometimes just a ghost). I say “our” project because, despite being the only translator of the poetic text, I feel thankful to my two ‘fellow travellers’: Andrea Raos, a Japan-based poet-translator, who first sent me your book as a gift and encouraged me to imagine an Italian translation, and who has already translated “Notanda”, and Veronica Costanza Ward, Afro-American-Italian poet and journalist who was enthralled by Zong! as soon as we described it to her, and constantly spurs us on. I imagine that even in translation Zong! cannot but be the result of a collective effort. We haven’t found a publisher yet, and I suspect the search will prove itself as complex as the translation, but I am hopeful. Of course, we will need your consent (and Weslyan’s, too). I don’t know whether you speak Italian, but if you feel like we can discuss the drafts (it would certainly be an invaluable help for me). As I am going on in the text I realize an essential part in the translation process is made up of recreating the hidden/overt/recurring relations among the ‘floating’ words and fragments; relations which are always multifarious (sonic, semantic, rhythmic, etc.) and which produce different effects, repeatedly displacing the reader, who’s never on ‘safe ground’. Very challenging work, but I do really hope I can go through it successfully.
Tell me what you think about this, whether you would like to take a look at some pages, and whatever you feel it is necessary to say and take care of.
Thank you very much,
My very best,
Renata Morresi
PS: you can find a short bio of mine here: http://docenti.unimc.it/renata.morresi
On June 11, 2021, Benway Series wrote:
Dear M. NourbeSe Philip,
We are happy to announce that the Italian translation of Zong! is about to go to print. We wish to thank you for the opportunity you gave us to work on your book, a task that deeply absorbed us in the last few years. The team was composed of the two of us for Benway Series, and then the translator, Renata Morresi (also an outstanding poet on her own), and Andrea Raos who contributed to the coordination of the project. The support of the Canada Council for the Arts was quintessential.
Please find attached to this email the PDF file of the translation. We will be happy to send you some copies of the book if you let us know your mail address.
For the promotion of the book we are in contact with the Embassy of Canada in Rome, and for the moment we are thinking of an online presentation, on Zoom or another similar platform. To this end, we would like to know if you would be interested in participating and when you might be available. We were thinking of some time between July and September, but we can be flexible according to your other engagements.
We would also be honored to plan a live (in person) presentation and/or reading some time in the future. So we were wondering if you may already be planning to come to Europe in the next few months or, conversely, if there are any periods from here until next year when it would be entirely impossible for you to plan a visit to Italy.
Thank you again for your beautiful book.
With our very best wishes,
Mariangela Guatteri and Giulio Marzaioli for Benway Series
On June 11, 2021, M. NourbeSe Philip wrote to Suzanna Tamminen of Wesleyan University Press:
Dear Suzanna,
Please see below—was a contract ever signed for this translation? They had mentioned in an earlier email —as in 2016 (see previous email)—that they would be in touch with Wesleyan. Please enquire as to what is going if you have not been apprised of this.
my best,
nourbeSe
On June 11, 2021, M. NourbeSe Philip wrote to Benway Series:
Dear Mariangela and Giulio,
Greetings and thank you for the good news of the translation! Congratulations to you all who have worked hard on this project—I am honoured and I know the Ancestors thank you. It is so important that this work reach European countries many of which are the ground zero of the trauma that is ongoing.
I am sorry to talk business at a time such as this, but I would very much appreciate it if someone would update me on this. Not having heard anything from anyone since 2016, I had no idea it was going ahead. Was a contract ever signed with Wesleyan? I am copying this to Wesleyan since they need to be involved in these discussions and I will of course be in contact with them.
Once again heartfelt congratulations,
nourbeSe
On June 14, 2021, Benway Series emails M. NourbeSe Philip, cc: Suzanna Tamminen, confirms contract with Wesleyan:
Dear NourbeSe,
Thank you so much for your kind reply.
Please be assured that Benway Series stipulated a regular contract with Wesleyan.
It will be a pleasure to mail you some copies of the book if you let us have your address.
In the hope of having the pleasure to meet you in Italy in the near future, and with our very best wishes,
Mariangela and Giulio
On June 14, 2021, Suzanna Tamminen wrote to M. NourbeSe Philip:
Hi NourbeSe,
Yes they have been very diligent and they have signed a formal agreement with us. There is also going to be a Swedish edition in 2022 with Ramus forlag.
Very best to you
Suzanna
On June 14, 2021, M. NourbeSe Philip wrote to Suzanna Tamminen:
Why haven’t you been keeping me aware of these developments? I am aware Wesleyan has world rights but I have never seen either contract; I have no idea what they have paid, if anything. This lack of transparency is unacceptable.
Yours truly,
NourbeSe
On June 14, 2021, Suzanna Tamminen replied to M. NourbeSe Philip:
Hi NourbeSe
It’s just not part of the normal process to send sub rights and permissions updates to authors. I will try to do this for your work, going forward. Benway is doing a very small edition of 200 copies and their fee is $150. The Swedish edition is planned for 800 copies and they will pay $1,225 in two instalments. I think we may receive some of this income in time to wrap it into the payment in August 2021, but more likely it will be received and paid out in fiscal 21-22. I hope that Kara at HFS was able to get the $1425 from last year to go through to you.
All best,
Suzanna
On June 15, 2021, M. NourbeSe Philip wrote to Benway Series regarding unauthorized translation:
Dear Mariengela Guatteri and Giulio Marzaioli,
I once again wish to thank you for the efforts you have made translating Zong! and acknowledge that it has been a long journey for you all. I have now had an opportunity to look at the “translated” text and I regret to say that I am extremely unhappy with it. I wish that somewhere along this long journey that you took, you had thought to talk to me. I wish Suzanna Tamminen had had the courtesy to let me know that you had approached her, so that I could have been in touch with you.
The most important activity happening in Zong! are the silences on the page, not the words. The central and organizing principal around which the words are laid out in the sections that follow Os is that no word or word cluster can come directly below another, thereby allowing them to breathe into the space above. In seeking the breath in the space above, the words echo the actions of those who were thrown overboard the slave ship Zong. They also resonate with the long struggle of Africans to find the breath and space of freedom—from the maroons running from enslavement to George Floyd, whose last words were, “I can’t breathe.” I repeat—the most important activity happening in the text Zong! are the silences which are filled with the unknown and the unknowing, filled with potentiality and possibility. Not the words. These silences, part of the larger Silence must be honoured. Formally and on the page. It is in honouring the formal constraints on the page that we honour the history and memory of the massacre, and, most importantly, those lives de-named, erased, dismissed and lost.
This simple but profound rule is what gives the text its distinctive shape. You have completely ignored that, and, as a consequence, what you have produced is a travesty of the poem and a dishonouring of all that the work is about.
I also want to address the fact that there were poets working on this text. I am surprised and disappointed that another poet would think it acceptable to disrespect another poet’s work to the degree that they would be careless with the placement of words or phrases. This is not how I understand poets to work, understanding as we do the deep and essential work that language does. One important aspect of our craft as poets is precision— precision of placement, precision of words, precision of punctuation, precision in all things. It is how we express care for language, for that is what we do as poets: we care for language and the wonderfully difficult work it does and in caring for language, we care for others, for their lives, filled with wonder and heartache and tragedy and trauma. We care for language, this thing that makes us being-human in ways those enslaved Africans on board the Zong were not cared for and were seen as so much cargo to be dispensed with. Zong! is a deep and profound expression of care for them, such as they did not find at the end of their lives on board the Zong. Unfortunately, this translation, while originating in a place of interest in the work and a desire to share it, continues this pattern of lack of care.
Form is of great importance and significance to me as a poet and Zong! is a work of great formal strength, a quality that was and is necessary to meet the powerful centrifugal—Cesaire refers to it as volcanic— force of the transatlantic trade in Africans (I would include the Arab trade as well.). To fail to honour the formal properties of the work is to mutilate the text (an act we are all too familiar with) and all that Zong! is attempting. To fail to honour the craft of a poet is a profound act of disrespect and reveals a lack of care on many levels.
I also have grave concerns with how the Ebora section has been “translated” and the cover is disappointing and does not do the work justice. All of this could have been avoided had you consulted with me; all of this could have been avoided if Suzanna Tamminen had let me know that she had signed an agreement with you for translation rights. Further to this point about communication, I pulled this off the internet regarding translating poetry:
“Know the poet. If you are lucky enough to pick a living poet to translate, write to him or her. Get to know the person; ask him or her questions about the poem. What was the poet thinking when writing the poem? What does the poet think the poem means? Is there any imagery or language that is repeated? Is there anything symbolic from his or her life? What does the poet think of poetry? The more you know about the poet and his or her life, the better able you are to understand the nuances of the poem. Be courteous and grateful. The poet is answering your questions to help you with your translation.”
I am aware that the desire to translate Zong! comes from admiration for the work and a desire to share the work with a European audience, which leaves me troubled and wondering why I was not consulted. I have my own ideas but I would welcome an explanation from you.
In conclusion, I am in fundamental opposition to the Benway Series publication of Zong! proceeding any further and I will be writing to the Canada Council on the matter and copying this letter to them. I have already been in communication with Suzanna Tamminen about her failure to let me know about the contract and will be in further communication to her. I know this will be a disappointment to you, especially given the time you have put into the translation. I can only trust that you understand my position as the “unauthor” of this story that cannot be told, yet must be told and which can only be told by not telling. I responded to the call of the Ancestors as one must when they come calling. It is they whom I honour and to whom I must listen. This translation dishonours them profoundly.
Yours truly,
nourbeSe philip
On June 18, 2021, Benway Series replied to M. NourbeSe Philip, cc: Suzanna Tamminen
Dear NourbeSe Philip,
We are deeply saddened that your first impression of our work on your book was negative. Renata Morresi is an extremely skilled, and multi-award-winning, poet and translator. As a matter of fact, before Suzanna agreed to give Benway Series the translation rights of your book, a first draft of the translation was anonymously peer-reviewed, in very positive terms. We don’t know whether it would be appropriate for Suzanna to let you see that review, but were it possible, we are confident that this could help in reassuring you about the seriousness of Renata’s work.
As for the cover, its design is in line with the characteristics of the series in which your book is published. Except that we decided to print your book in a size that is way larger than the other titles, precisely in an effort to respect as much as possible the form as well as the spirit of the original.
Regarding Ẹbọra, it was ‘translated’ by Mariangela Guatteri, who is a visual artist and writer on her own in addition to being the person that physically (almost literally with her own hands) creates the Benway Series books. She writes as follows:
«My starting point was the process that originated Ẹbọra as it is described in Notanda. I thought that it wouldn’t be possible to translate an unwanted mistake generated by a machine, even though that mistake was later rationalized and accepted by the author. Therefore, my attempt was to reproduce the outcome of that very mistake.
This resulted in textual pages that also have a very strong visual (and emotional) dimension.
Furthermore, this visual dimension is made of movements, of plenums and voids (i.e. full and empty spaces), and of planes that break away from the two-dimensional spaces. These are the aspects I focused on.
To me, one very important trait of Ẹbọra is that the visual and textual dimensions intertwine and reinforce each other, thus creating surfacings and disappearances.
I should also add that the pages I worked on were not chosen randomly; inasmuch as possible, I retraced the corresponding pages in the original Ẹbọra.»
Regarding your intention to write to the Canada Council for the Arts, we think that you should be aware of the nature of Benway Series. Founded in 2013, Benway is not a mainstream publishing house. It is a project by poets for poets that makes beautifully crafted books, painstakingly going after every single detail. And over the years, we have published authors such as Nathalie Quintane, Charles Reznikoff, Francis Ponge, Forrest Gander, and several others.
You are entirely right when you say that we, Benway Series and the translator, should have contacted you earlier. But please be aware that, although the project has been ongoing since at least 2016, the great bulk of the translation, the editing and the painstaking proof-reading of your book was essentially done during the pandemic, among great personal and professional difficulties, and on a very tight schedule. We hope that we can count on your understanding, and that you will accept our heartfelt apologies.
Very sincerely yours,
Mariangela Guatteri and Giulio Marzaioli for Benway Series, Renata Morresi, Andrea Raos
On June 21, 2021, Renata Morresi contacted M. NourbeSe Philip:
Dear NourbeSe Philip,
Please allow me a few words about the translation of Zong!, the humbling experience that it has been, the importance of this first translation – and not just for the literary field – in the country where I live, and the feelings of utter respect that have kept me from disturbing you.
The translation of Zong! in a foreign language could only happen within the limits and the horizon of that language: not merely its unfamiliar rules and words, but also its unfamiliar relationship to what is silent, what is obliterated, what is unspoken. (‘Unfamiliar’ and ‘foreign’ are always situated, though, and relative, which reminds me of what Glissant suggested: we always write in the presence of all languages). I understand it must be a bit of shock to see one’s work into what seems a different, apparently incongruous, form. But in that excess, in the space of difference, there hopefully lies new resonance. The dialogue is renewed, the nekyia goes on.
More humbly, I am aware that my ‘version’ of the work into Italian is just one of the many possible versions, and it is not so much ‘mine’, rather an extension of a primary, incomparable work; its ambition is to be read by those people who can’t speak or read the original in English. And there are many in Italy, which is still quite a monolingual country, in many ways still regrettably monocultural.
I don’t think that this work has betrayed the foundations of the ‘source text’: it has used the Gregson v. Gilbert report as a word bank, it has fragmented words as a way to mirror the destruction of African life on board of the Zong, and in every possible way it has aspired to opening up the ‘logical’ lexis to its many other possible lives: other languages, other touches, other cries, other prayers, other silences. There is so much silence in Italy about the boat-people who cross the Mediterranean to look for work, hope, refuge in Europe. Many of them end up finding the opposite: centers where they are kept prisoners, without an identity, jobs that exploit them, new forms of segregation. And before all this, torture and exploitation in the North-African detention camps and then, in this middle passage, sometimes – how many times? – the bottom of the sea. I must admit this: my work with Zong! has been a way to short circuit these facts and those facts, and spotlight the ghastly dehumanization still going on in the name of profit, hierarchy, status. You are perhaps not aware of the debate about citizenship going on in Italy, where people who were born and raised here haven’t got access to Italian citizenship if their parents are migrants. Thousands of young people left without political rights and whose civil and human rights are deeply affected in the name of a supposed hereditary Italianness.
But about the translation, again: you must not think it has been rushed or unadvised. Much study has been going on, a lot of reading of your other works, of critical essays about Zong!, interviews, reviews, history of the slave trade, poetics of trauma and memory, your presentations and readings on YouTube, and more.
I had to work within the constraint of a language with different morphology and syntax, with very few monosyllabic words, unlike English, and gender inflection, to name just one of the ‘problems’. I asked for your blessing but I still feel it would have been naïve to ask you whether this Italian word or that Italian word would have been better. It was not a question of words in the first place, I assure you I am completely aware of that. Translating is a process that has to do not with what the words say but with what a text does. And surprisingly enough Zong! manages to do many things, even in this format you found so repulsive.
A personal note: it is thanks to my Slavic grandmother, a post-war refugee with her two sisters, who never came to learn Italian ‘properly’ (whatever that means), and from her multilingual lullabies and riddles that I ended up loving poetry and its possibilities. I do hope that her selfless spirit of devotion to others has at least in part guided me in a translation meant to be of service, without any other ambition than to serve your work and the people who can’t have access to its original voice/s.
I am aware that Zong! may have many enemies in this country: ultra-conservatives, nostalgic fascists, theo-cons, the populist right, the ‘standard’ racists, the cynics and the elitists who will probably keep on snubbing and ignoring it. In this struggle, it would be tremendously painful not to have the author’s support. I sincerely hope you will come to look at this rendition in a new light: as an opportunity and not so much as a flaw.
Yours truly,
Renata Morresi
On July 1, 2021, Renata Morresi contacts M. NourbeSe Philip:
Dear NourbeSe,
It’s a pleasure to read that your work is so widely loved, I had no doubt about it. I am very sorry and I must apologize for everything that went wrong in our communication. Let me please explain what I meant when I said, in a previous email, that everything was done out of respect towards you. When I wrote to tell you about the translation and ask for your support, you were kind, but then you never told me you were interested in talking about it and actually never replied (I’ll send here the email in attachment, just for the sake of clarity). I thought that it was because you were busy and found the thing of minor interest; to tell the truth, Italian is a minor language, so I understand that an English-speaking author is not really into it. That’s why when I found the Benway series publisher willing to communicate with your publisher I thought it was wiser to go ‘the institutional way’, not bothering you directly. We sent sample translations to Wesleyan, they had them reviewed, and they wrote the contract that the Italian publisher signed. I presumed you knew everything, I now realized how wrong I was.
Let me briefly add something about the translation itself: discrepancies in the alignment were not the result of random choices. Translation is about the negotiation of differences and the differences between the two languages involved a different treatment of the space: I preferred to deal with the clusters as coordinates than to maintain the original spacing, because this would have meant, in some cases, a disruption in the lines. There’s also another reason for this choice: in October 2013 a boat carrying hundreds of migrants shipwrecked out of the coast of Lampedusa, in Southern Italy. More than 360 people died and this tragedy was a turning point in the history of the Mediterranean for many reasons. One of the pilots of the helicopters involved in the rescue operations later described the appalling sight that he could see from above, and how the pilots involved chose the floating body of a woman dressed in vivid purple to function as a reference point (in Italian it’s called “punto nave”, literally “ship point”) to give coordinates and assistance to the rescuing team below. So, I treated the clusters not as points pinned on the page, but as floating points in relation to each other, which could provide a form of help in this moment of danger, even after more than 200 years. I am deeply sorry that this was taken as a misappropriation. Maybe it was, maybe there’s nothing like the past, nothing like the present.
The origins of writing cannot be the same (say, me invoking the Ancestors to reproduce the conditions of production: I wouldn’t dare): my work is not an original and it will never be; but it’s not a final work either, and I am willing to work on it to fix it, if you agree to allow me.
I’ll teach your work next semester (your work, not my translation) and there will likely be students who will want to write their thesis about it: I would be grateful if you could share any advice.
Please, accept my deepest apologies,
Renata
On July 8, 2021, Suzanna Tamminen contacts M. NourbeSe Philip:
Dear NourbeSe,
I am writing with some thoughts about the Italian edition of Zong!. Benway contacted us in fall 2019 and sent us the attached sample of materials, which were vetted by an outside reader. The reader’s comments are below. Benway contacted us again in April 2020, and we proceeded to a contract. The next time we heard from them was June 2021, when they emailed you and I together about the completion of the work, and shared the full page proofs.
When I compare the Italian page proofs to the English edition, page for page, I see that the Italian follows the layout of the English exactly. The Italian often needs more letters, though, which is creating a lack of space when compared to the English. I think the best solution to this would be to add a translators’ note in the book that would explain how the translation was made, and show a few pages of the original as a comparison.
Once this edition is published, I expect it receive reviews and that both its themes as well as its successes and flaws as a translation can be discussed. Expanding the critical discourse on the book in this way helps to ensure that the book remains on reading lists for years to come. I will email Benway to see if they have had any additional thoughts about this, and if they would consider adding a translator’s note to the book.
Please note that Stephanie and I are back in the office now and can be reached again at [redacted].
With best regards,
Suzanna
Outside reader comments [added]: This highly ambitious manuscript of translation brought to fruition by a respected poet and translator holds out great promise, and deserves to be published as soon as practicable once it is complete; indeed, it has been eagerly anticipated in the small but robust experimental literary community in Italy. I was grateful to have a chance to read these sections, and from the very impressive first pages that replicate deconstruction of the words “water/acqua” and “good/buono” across a linguistic divide to the increasingly granular dissections of “Sal,” was gratified by what I encountered. The translator’s choice to bring Philip’s epic poetry into the Italian language represents, in my view, nothing less than a watershed in contemporary European literature. Rendered in all its brokenness and resuturing to the other languages complicit in the suffering of drowned Africans of the Middle Passage (and their heirs), yet (hopefully) armed with the renowned and pointed critical apparatus of Philip’s afterword, this work promises to introduce to the Italian republic of letters—and to a tongue on the front lines of the global migration “crisis”—a language with which to address, and rebuke, the unspeakable legal and ethical failures being legitimized daily by a mounting white supremacist state apparatus.
As would be the case in nearly any translation of difficult poetry, I have questions about some lexical choices—though I am certain that the renderings here were made upon vigilant reflection, and imagine that this text will be accompanied by a translator’s introduction that can work through some of their logic. I wonder, for instance, about the rendering of “throwing” as “evacuazione,” which has the benefit of echoing “acqua,” and also reflects the way that contemporary rescue missions are represented in the news, but does not represent the same physical action as the very violent “throwing” (“gettare”) or, for instance, the dark philosophical shadow of Heidegger. “Garante,” similarly, has a very different feeling from the original English term “underwriter,” which in this text can be read literally and somehow throw the meaning of the overlords’ law into question (hence the translator might consider “sottoscrittore”). Other choices by Philip such as “arose” (which returns in the form of “rose”), “weight,” and “ground” also play with these freighted issues of grounding, drowning, aboveness and belowness, and might influence the translation as it progresses. Other choices such as the use of proper nouns that echo concepts, or the use of creole, are very difficult to determine, requiring great flexibility and multiple solutions on the translator’s part, and one could debate them endlessly: the substitution of “pietà” for “ruth,” for instance, or the decision to render italicized spoken nation-language phrases such as “dem cam fo me” as the relatively standard (and unitalicized) “gli uomini vengono per me.” I would like to see some italicization in places where effects like these are either lost or changed. Narrative notes at the end of the text would also help the Italian readership to grasp the translation process on a more granular level.
The highly inflected Italian is not as flexible as the simpler English grammar, and this introduces some truly knotty problems for any translator between the two languages. I would be careful in this text about keeping verbs such as “die” distinct from nouns such as “death” (for instance on page 15 of Zong #9, “the suffered in / die”), and notwithstanding the discomfort it creates, maintaining the ungrammaticality of moments like these (page 19 of the original, “could / found,” is made grammatical with “potuto / trovare”). At certain points the changing of a preposition in “Os” changes the meaning, and in such ladder-like assemblages this creates a question in the reader’s mind. I’m thinking of, for instance, “schiavi / in ordine di / distrutti” instead of “slaves / to the order of / destroyed.” To be a slave to something is not the same thing as being a slave in an order of something. In other places where the English is broken as a result of forcing a centuries-old lexicon into contemporary lingo (such as “where s the cat”) it would be important to retain this sense of fragmentation at as many points as possible (rather than restoring to “dove è il gatto”), in my opinion. (The translation does retain traces of this, but not in every single case.)
In “Sal,” on the other hand, the English text’s recourse to Latin makes for an almost natural translation into Italian, and one delights in how well Philip’s effects come across.
On July 13, 2021, M. NourbeSe Philip replied to Suzanna Tamminen:
Dear Suzanna,
You are entirely mistaken in your statement that the “Italian follows the layout of the English exactly.” I have attached random pages selected from the translation with the relevant page # from the Wesleyan edition: it is very clear that it does not “exactly” follow the layout of the original.
I do not agree with nor do I accept what you describe as the “best solution.” You clearly do not, nor do you care to, understand the conceptual ideas or the formal properties behind the work. If you did, you could not so cavalierly talk about this translation that so disrespects those ideas and properties, and, more importantly, the work that the text accomplishes in the world for Black and African-descended people living in the wake of the trans-Atlantic trade in Africans. If you did, you would not reduce this failed attempt at a translation of Zong! to a matter of getting “reviews” and “ensuring that the book remains on reading lists for years to come.”
The failure of the translator, Renata Morresi, and the publishers, Benway, to contact me, compounded by your own egregious failure to include me in this process, demonstrates the workings of white supremacy at both the institutional and personal levels. Let me parse that for you: there have been at least five people engaged in this translation— the translator, the two individuals from Benway, the external reader of the translation sample sent to you, and yourself, all of whom are white, deciding on the translation of a work by a Black and African-descended author about a horrific event in the cataclysmic history that is the Maafa(the transatlantic slave trade), and no one thinks that it just might be useful or helpful to speak to the author of the work. Didn’t the optics of this not strike you as unacceptable, or are you all so engorged with a sense of your own self-importance that it appeared normal? I question whether this would so easily have happened were the poet from a culture other than Black or African; I also question whether this would have happened so easily to a white, male author, and the very fact that I have to raise these questions to myself tells me how little has, indeed, changed. Your proposal of the “best solution” to the present situation ignores a process that was flawed from the beginning—a process that was profoundly disrespectful of me as the author and results in an outcome, despite all the good intentions of all of you, that can only be described as racist. It is a process that you participated in and fostered. This flawed and racist process has resulted in a translation that fundamentally disregards the organizing principle of, and the conceptual idea undergirding, the text—that no word or cluster of words can come directly under another; each word or word cluster is seeking the space directly above it to breathe, the reasons for which are both theoretical and spiritual. Then and now the words and word clusters breathe in honour and in memory of those who could not and still cannot breathe. It is also this theoretical organizing principle that gives the work its distinctive shape and appearance.
I will share with you a quotation I shared with Benway regarding the value of the translator speaking to the poet if they are alive, which I found on the internet with just cursory searching. I cannot believe that this is new to you as editor-in-chief, or any of the others involved in this sorry endeavour of erasure:
“Know the poet. If you are lucky enough to pick a living poet to translate, write to him or her. Get to know the person; ask him or her questions about the poem. What was the poet thinking when writing the poem? What does the poet think the poem means? Is there any imagery or language that is repeated? Is there anything symbolic from his or her life? What does the poet think of poetry? The more you know about the poet and his or her life, the better able you are to understand the nuances of the poem. Be courteous and grateful. The poet is answering your questions to help you with your translation.”
The most important thing happening on the pages of Zong! is not the words but the Silence/s within the spaces into which words breathe; that breath and those Silence/s must also be translated. Theoretically those Silence/s are akin and kin to the Glissantian opacity. Translation of Zong! cannot be about simply “follow(ing) the layout of the English exactly,” as you put it. That would be to create a facsimile, which this translation attempts and fails at. I remind you that in 2008 Wesleyan, under your editorship, had to redo the first printing of Zong! for this very reason—the original text was too cramped and narrow and did not breathe.
Zong! works with what Nathaniel Mackey would describe as the poetics of the breath, as well as with what I call the poetics of the fragment. These two are in constant, dynamic tension and interplay throughout the poem, and the new language that begins to emerge as one goes deeper into the text is only possible because of the interplay between word and Silence—breathed Silence.
Despite these fundamental textual problems, which could have been addressed through one conversation with me, not to mention the absence of a respectful process or adequate protocols, your email urges that what Renata Morresi has done is good enough; that I should accept it, settle for a “translator’s note.” And, once again I pause and reflect on whether this is an aspect of that old, tired, racist attitude that finds it acceptable that Black people should operate from a lower standard—the it’s-good-enough-for-you principle. Because that is what you are asking me to do—accept a lower standard for this translation than I set for myself for Zong!.
I ought not to be surprised, however, at your actions, given that in 2018 you, as publisher of Zong!, without notice withdrew your earlier support of our then joint attempts to have the artist Rana Hamadeh acknowledge her appropriation of Zong! in her 2017 installation in Rotterdam. You stopped replying to my emails and, indeed, only finally responded when I complained to the Authors’ Guild about your behaviour. The result of your actions, which you have never explained, was that my attempts to get acknowledgement of Hamadeh’s extensive use of Zong! had to be aborted. I found your behaviour then, as editor-in-chief of Wesleyan, disgraceful in abandoning support for the work. Today, however, you urge me to accept the mess of pottage—”reviews” and the promise of “reading lists”—that according to you is the “best solution.”
Every poet and writer wants reviews of their work; we all want to be on reading lists, but I do not think that any writer of integrity writes for that reason. I wrote Zong!, among other reasons, to explore the meaning of meaning in the face of atrocity; I wrote Zong! to investigate whether being can ever be sufficient, or whether it is always contingent; I wrote Zong! to remember the dead, those on board the Zong who died such a horrific death, and in so doing to grieve on behalf of those who could not grieve then and who have been so long forgotten. I wrote Zong! to honour the memory of the Ancestors. Zong! has become a sacred text, a lament, a mourning song of grief to those who, bereft of kith and kin, died unmourned, and while it remains a book, its non-material antecedents are embedded in what I call the Protocols of Care, which are an integral part of the book. Those protocols entailed my seeking permission of the Ancestors to bring those voices forward, which, in turn, resulted in the need to acknowledge another type of authorship on the cover of the book in the words: “As told to the author by Setaey Adamu Boateng.” Some call this collaboration; I, an abdication of the ego. In addition, in moving into performance and the annual collective readings, Zong! throws its many-voiced voice forward into community and collectivity. All this by way of saying that the creation and unauthorhsip of Zong! was a laborious, careful and care-filled act of working with and listening to the Ancestors. Indeed, in their perceptive and helpful comments regarding the translation, the outside reviewer clearly reveals the need for care to be taken with the text. It is, therefore, beyond strange, astonishing, and confounding that that care didn’t extend to consulting with me, but then maybe not; perhaps it was entirely predictable when racism, the everyday, ordinary kind of racism that just doesn’t see Black folX is factored in. What you, Benway and Renata Moressi have done is an utter violation of the care-filled aspect of the work and betrays the ideal of care that is at the heart of the work. For you to talk about “reviews” and “the book remaining on reading lists” is a profound travesty—indeed, it is tantamount to those on board the Zong who decided to jettison their “cargo”, the enslaved Africans, to collect insurance monies. Wesleyan owns subsidiary rights to Zong! and as such has the law on its side, as did those responsible for the murder of enslaved Africans on board the Zong!, the shipowners. There is, however, the letter of the law and the spirit of the law, and it is the latter concept that has been fundamentally breached and betrayed by the acts of erasure of all of those involved in this. I will not be a party to this and will not now or ever give my consent to this translation, which betrays the core principles, ideas and concepts of Zong!, as well as a sacred pact with the dead and the Ancestors.
It has been clear since 2018 that you do not have the best interests of the work at heart. I do not expect you to be invested in, or even care particularly about the monumental work so many of us are engaged in; work which entails piecing together broken histories, fragmented lives, lost cultures, and healing the historical trauma that underpins the history of Black and African-descended people, but what I resent deeply is that your casual acts of erasure and disrespect, and the ensuing racist outcomes result in burdening me with more work and more stress in my life, at a time that is already exceedingly stressful.
In closing: how dare you?!
yours truly,
nourbeSe Philip
On August 30, 2021, Suzanna Tamminen replied to M. NourbeSe Philip:
Dear NourbeSe,
Thank you for your email. I am grieved that the Italian edition of Zong!, and the process of its unfolding, has caused you such distress. I received a copy of the book this week and a copy for you as well, which I am putting into Fedex to you. I had asked Benway to hold the book from distribution, but due to their grant from the Canadian Council of the Arts, which came with a requirement to publish by the end of June, they felt they needed to move forward.
I discussed your email with the staff and we have begun to look at our processes surrounding the sublicensing of translation rights, and to consider how to improve them. The Association of University Presses committee on equity, justice and inclusion is preparing a resource to help publishers make their contracts more equitable. Stephanie serves on this committee, and we have discussed the critical importance of seeking input from authors of color and authors from historically disenfranchised groups, to find out what is wanted and needed.
There are several other translations of Zong! underway or under consideration. These include editions in Danish, Swedish, Portuguese and Greek. Would you like to be contacted by the translators? If so, I will share your contact info with the publishers and request that their translators contact you.
I will continue to consider how I and the press can do better, and I will let you know whenever new translation projects are proposed.
Yours,
Suzanna
On September 1, 2021, M. NourbeSe Philip wrote to Benway Series, Renata Morresi and Suzanna Tamminen:
Dear Guatteri and Giolio Marzaioli and Renata Morresi and Suzanna,
Today I received an email from Suzanna Tamminen that Benway Series are going ahead with the publication of the translation of Zong!. Based on my previous correspondence you are all well aware that I am entirely opposed to this publication. Let me once again briefly set out my reasons:
1. Although within her rights to do so, Suzanna Tamminen sold the rights to Benway Series for $150. Suzanna Tamminen neglected to inform me that she had done so, nor did she do anything to put me in touch with the translator Renata Morresi. This is not in keeping with standard practice.
2. Renata Morresi herself failed to contact me to consult with me about the translation.
3. At least five people, including an American reader of a sample of the translation, as well as the Canada Council, which funded the translation, have been involved in this Italian translation of Zong!, all of whom are white and yet no one thought it necessary to consult with me, the Black and African-descended author of the work.
4. Renata Morresi has failed to respect the foundational and organizing principle of Zong!, which is that no word or cluster of words can come directly below another: each word fragment, word or word cluster is seeking the space above to breathe as those massacred 240 years ago this November were not able to breathe. It is this restraint and conceptual rigour that gives the work its shape. Based on her correspondence with me Renata Morresi is not interested in this and has her own ideas as to how the work should appear.
5. Despite my making my concerns and opposition clear to you all in June of this year, you are still going ahead with the publication on the grounds that you informed the Canada Council that you would publish by June 2021! I will be contacting the office that funded this as well as Jesse Wente the current head of the Canada Council who is himself Indigenous.
From its inception to its end the entire process of this translation mirrors the transactional relations and the racism that resulted in the transatlantic trade in Africans and the Zong massacre in particular; it is a process that makes a travesty of the care and attention that are at the heart of Zong! in both the preparatory work and its composition. Most importantly Zong! and its life in the world constitute a practice that is reparative in intent—reparative of the souls lost in 1781, who stand in for the many, many others lost to this inhumane and insane act of extended barbarity, as well as reparative for those who today continue to mourn them and ourselves. I cannot speak to your intentions but the results of your actions are racist and represent the white supremacist attitudes so prevalent in the publishing world.
The most egregiously racist aspect of your behaviour, however, is your consummate and committed indifference to the rigour of the ideas and theories behind the formal constraints of the work, integrally tied as they are to the circumstances of the massacre. Despite my bringing to your attention the need to respect the form of the work, despite my explaining why the need for the words and their fragments to breathe for those who couldn’t is non-negotiable, despite all this you insist on going ahead. Indeed, the book is advertised on Benway’s website. All of this could have been solved by a simple phone call to the author by the translator, had the necessary respect and care been there. And barely a year after the lynching of George Floyd and the uprising against racial injustice around the world, your actions appear even more deplorable.
You have all failed to honour the dead, the souls at the heart of this work, as you have failed to honour the care and attention that have gone into the preparation and composition of Zong!. I am calling on you to take down the advertisement on your website and to destroy this publication of Zong!. If I do not hear from you by end of day on September 1, 2021, I will be going public with this extraordinary act of contempt for a Black and African-descend writer.
Yours truly,
m. nourbeSe philip (PWA)
On September 1, 2021, Suzanna Tamminen replied to M. NourbeSe Philip, Benway Series, and Renata Morresi, cc: Stephanie Elliot Prieto (Wesleyan), Embassy of Canada, Consular Section (Rome):
Dear NourbeSe, Benway editors and Renata,
Thank you for your email, NourbeSe. I have looked again at the translation layout, comparing it carefully to the original and I can now see what you mean about the phrases not having enough space, and lines that sit above one another in ways that they don’t in the original. I feel very bad that I didn’t properly recognize this issue before. As I am understanding things now, I am deeply distressed that so many lines of the translation are in effect hindering the breathing of the lines below.
I hope Benway will take this concern to heart, and look again at the translation, and will consider destroying the existing copies. I am very sorry, but I feel this would be the right decision.
Going forward, I hope there will be earnest discussion about the translation process, and a recognition of the importance of the organizing principals of the line spacing as part of the spiritual practice of this work.
Please inform us of your decision as soon as possible.
Yours,
Suzanna
On September 1, 2021, Renata Morresi wrote to M. NourbeSe Philip, cc: Suzanna Tamminen, Benway Series, cc: Stephanie Elliot (Wesleyan), Embassy of Canada, Consular Section (Rome):
Dear NourbeSe Philip,
As in the previous emails we have exchanged I would like to underline that:
1) I wrote to you and asked for your advice and collaboration more than once. If you remember well, one of the last attempts was done by our mutual friend Veronica Ward, an Italian-African-American journalist who has supported the translation of Zong! since the beginning and who has discussed its impact in Italy with you during a series of interviews you had. She asked you to have a video call together a few months ago, but you declined that too.
2) I invite everybody who hasn’t had the chance to do it yet to compare the original and its translation page by page: they will realize that the Italian version follows the layout of the original in almost every instance. Yes, in a few instances a word or a cluster of words slightly superimposes the word or cluster of words in the previous line, for the space of a character or two, but this is due to the inherent differences between English (an isolating language) and Italian (an inflected language: its morphology makes it inevitably longer) and the need to preserve the integrity of the page. This is a very interesting problem in the translation of poetry, where rhythm, meter, spacing, line-breaks, prosody are so central, and for this reason always seriously addressed. Literary translation is a form of reading, and it is always, inherently, about negotiation, otherwise we would do it with a software tool, which ‘respects’ everything but doesn’t understand anything. Of course, no translation is given once and for all: I could work on a reviewed edition where the main concern is spacing. I will have to reconsider lines, then, and pages. I am not sure Benway Series will be still available, though, given the circumstances. I will discuss the possibility with Mariangela Guatteri and Giulio Marzaioli.
I would also like to add that:
3) You shouldn’t take our ethnicities or our loyalties for granted without even bothering to ask.
4) It is very problematic to demand the destruction of a book, all the more so in Italy, where not so long ago books were burned and foreign words were banned in the name of racial and ethnic purity. Benway has worked in respect of all the required standards. If my version is as bad as you say, it will show, and critics will criticize it. Comparing a work in translation to an actual murder is, alas, unfortunate. Benway is an esteemed but small publishing series and we are a group of poet-translators with no academic power, you are a world-famous and prize-winning author writing in the global language par excellence: if you want to say that my translation is not rigorous, even without having read it, you can certainly do it, but demanding to destroy the book is an act of cultural arrogance which is simply unfair.
As I wrote to you some time ago, the premises of the Zong massacre are still active also here in the Mediterranean, with thousands of lives lost to the blind politics of the European Union and to the fascist sentiments periodically resurging in Italy. I would lie if I said that this translation was done without having them in mind, keeping always in mind their obliterated conversations with history, the survivors’ plea for human and civil rights, and their children’s call for citizenship. I think the dotted line I have traced between them and the victims of the Zong massacre does not erase the voices of your book, rather it makes them resonate further. This is just my perspective, neither formally nor ethically unfounded though.
I hope we can find a way out of this impasse, also for the sake of those readers who cannot read the work in the original language.
My best regards,
Renata Morresi
On September 7, 2021, M. NourbeSe Philip wrote to Benway Series:
Benway Series has not had the courtesy to respond to me and the advertisement for Zong! is still up on Benway Series’ website.
On September 9, 2021, Benway Series replied to M. NourbeSe Philip:
Dear NourbeSe Philip,
We write as Benway Series publishing project, without Renata Morresi, in her role as translator, being held accountable for what is contained in the following response, which replies to your comments of September 1:
1. We cannot be held responsible for the manner of proceeding chosen by Suzanna Tamminem. We interacted with her in full compliance with her requests and the terms of the agreement, and the transfer of translation rights led us to believe that you had discussed the terms;
2. This issue has already been addressed by Morresi. We can add that in our experience translations require multiple revisions, but not the inevitable intervention of the author, whose contribution can be useful but also questionable, and certainly limited, given the unavoidable differences in language and context;
3. We do not know the ethnic composition of the committees who evaluated the translation and the value of the project we submitted: we trusted Wesleyan University Press and the Canada Council to be inclusive institutions accustomed to fair practices;
4. The publication of the translation of Zong! is a matter for Benway (not Morresi), and Benway claims validity and legitimacy for the book, both in terms of poetic restitution and in terms of the graphic rendering of the text, which, moreover, has been elaborated and produced with the utmost care;
5. The Italian edition of Zong! is the object of a publishing agreement between Benway, who bought the rights, and Wesleyan, who sold them. Doubts about the book’s quality and graphic rendering must be brought within the scope of this relation and cannot be attributed to identity differences or presumed essences.
We invite you to browse through the book as a material object to fully appreciate the qualities of the work.
Our best regards,
Mariangela Guatteri e Giulio Marzaioli
On September 9, 2021, M. NourbeSe Philip contacts Benway Series:
I would very much appreciate if you would provide me with the name and contact of the person you dealt with at the Canada Council.
On September 11, 2021, Benway Series replies to M. NourbeSe Philip:
We didn’t have a direct interlocutor: applicants are not to know who the project’s evaluators will be.
Regards
Benway Series
They Cannot Have Our Ancestors’ Bones
They Cannot Have our Ancestors’ Bones; Or Their Memories
September 9, 2021
On September 8, 2021, I called for the destruction of the Italian translation of Zong! by Renata Morresi and published by Benway Series to whom Wesleyan University Press (WUP), under the editorship of Suzanna Tamminen, sold the rights for $150. What follows is a short summary of the circumstances presented here in the form of a letter sent to the parties involved, and explaining, to some degree, the events that led to my taking that position.
I will be posting a longer description with quotes from the correspondence between the different parties, but for the time being—until tomorrow when I will release the longer version—I want to share this abbreviated outline with as many people as possible. I keep thinking—I can’t believe this is actually happening, but it is. It always is, isn’t it?
On or about May 31, 2016, Renata Morresi contacted me by email to let me know that she was interested in doing a translation of Zong!. It appeared that she had begun the translation because she did ask about sending pages to me, but she had neither a contract or a publisher and it appeared to me something of a passion project. I told her she had to contact the publishers, Wesleyan University Press (WUP) for permission. I heard nothing more from Ms. Morresi or WUP. Some five years later on June 11, 2021, I received an email from Benway Series congratulating me on the publication of the Italian translation of Zong!.
Sometime in 2020, WUP sold the rights to Benway Series, as they are entitled to do, by contract. The rights were sold for $150. Neither WUP, nor Benway Series, nor Renata Morresi contacted me about this. I understand that it is common practice to contact living authors when doing translations of their work.
There are two issues here: one is the issue of the process that was engaged in by all the parties to this translation—Suzanna Tamminen, editor, Renata Morresi, translator, Mariengela Guatteri and Giulio Marzaioli, editors at Benway Series and myself. There was also a reader of some of the translated text who, as is the custom, is and should remain anonymous. The four people involved in this translation, mentioned above, are all European and white or white passing, and yet no one thought that it might be somewhat useful to talk to the Black, African-descended author, or even send a letter with questions. Particularly concerning a work like Zong!.
Further, I was told by Benway Series that they received Canada Council funding to publish the translation, I assume because I am Canadian. My question is why the Council is funding projects that are racist in outcome, if not intention. The other issue is that of a fundamental problem with the translation itself, which fails to honour the foundational concept and principle of Zong!, which is that no word, fragment, or cluster of words can come directly below another: each word fragment, word or word cluster is seeking the space above to breathe as those massacred 240 years ago this November were not able to breathe. It revolves around the poetics and precarity of breath—to quote Mackey—for Black and African-descended people. It is this restraint and conceptual rigour that underlies and underscores the proprioceptive movement of, and within, the text, and gives the work its distinctive shape. It cannot be stressed too much that this formal practice becomes an integral part of the content of the work. In this way, the very form of the work becomes a constant honouring of the Ancestors. Based on her correspondence with me, Renata Morresi appears to have her own ideas as to how the work should appear, which the longer document will describe through quotes from her correspondence. Both these issues—that of the process of the translation and the issue of form—are integrally related to each other and to the protocols of care; they are intertwined. The entire process reveals to me the continued impulse to, and enactment of, the erasure by white institutions, including literary institutions, of Black and African realities, histories, cultures and cultural products, even as these expressions and products, tangible and intangible, are consumed by those enacting the erasures.
Despite my making my concerns and opposition clear to all the parties over some 3 months—I have not been able to track down which department at the Canada Council funded the project, no one appeared to be listening to what I had to say. Most recently however, and by email dated September 1, 2021, Ms. Tamminen finally agreed with me, expressed regret and agreed that the books should be destroyed. The most recent email received from Benway Series today, September 9, 2021, is basically a dismissal of all of my concerns.
From its inception to its end, the entire process of this translation mirrors the transactional relations and the racism that are at the core of the transatlantic trade in Africans, and the Zong massacre in particular; it is a process that makes a travesty of the care and attention that are at the heart of Zong! in both the preparatory work and its composition. Most importantly, Zong! and its life in the world constitute a practice that is reparative in intent—reparative of the souls lost in 1781, who stand in for the many, many others lost to this inhumane and insane act of extended barbarity, as well as reparative for those who today continue to mourn them and ourselves.
Barely a year after the lynching of George Floyd and the uprising against racial injustice around the world, their actions appear even more deplorable. They have failed to honour the dead, the souls at the heart of this work, as they have failed to honour the care and attention that have gone into the preparation and composition of Zong!.
I close with the words of the brilliant scholar, Katherine McKittrick in response to this situation:
… I cannot stop thinking about how this beautiful and difficult poem cycle is made fungible by people. It is like they are enacting what you demand we should not do. It’s like they learned nothing. I’m baffled and it makes me think a lot about how black poetry—like black music, like black labour, like black smiles—is a site of terrible extraction. (Email dated June 21, 2021).
Once again I call on Benway Series to take down the advertisement on their website and to destroy this publication of Zong!. Look out for the more detailed description tomorrow.
I will be using social media to publicize this egregious display of racism and white supremacy in the literary world. I am not very adept at IG and Twitter but I will be seeking help. I welcome any constructive ideas from those interested in these issues.
II
THEY HAVE FEASTED ON OUR FLESH; THEY WILL NOT HAVE OUR BONES
September 10, 2021
I am overwhelmed by the support. I thank you all. I have felt very, very alone dealing with this and other similar issues related to this book and another book of mine, Harriet’s Daughter. This particular issue, though, has broken my heart because I have been telling them for 3 months what is at the heart of the work. No one was willing to listen.
I have posted below an excerpt from a letter I wrote to Suzanna Tamminen about what was wrong with the process and the text.
Six weeks later her response was that Benway Series had told the Canada Council they were going to publish in June, and they were going ahead with it. This is why I decided to take these actions.
Excerpt from email to Suzanna Tamminen sent July 13 ,2021:
“Despite these fundamental textual problems, which could have been addressed through one conversation with me, not to mention the absence of a respectful process or adequate protocols, your email urges that what Renata Morresi has done is good enough; that I should accept it, settle for a “translator’s note.” And, once again I pause and reflect on whether this is an aspect of that old, tired, racist attitude that finds it acceptable that Black people should operate from a lower standard—the it’s-good-enough-for-you principle. Because that is what you are asking me to do—accept a lower standard for this translation than I set for myself for Zong!.
Every poet and writer wants reviews of their work; we all want to be on reading lists, but I do not think that any writer of integrity writes for that reason. I wrote Zong!, among other reasons, to explore the meaning of meaning in the face of atrocity; I wrote Zong! to investigate whether being can ever be sufficient, or whether it is always contingent; I wrote Zong! to remember the dead, those on board the Zong who died such a horrific death, and in so doing to grieve on behalf of those who could not grieve then and who have been so long forgotten. I wrote Zong! to honour the memory of the Ancestors. Zong! has become a sacred text, a lament, a mourning song of grief to those who, bereft of kith and kin, died unmourned, and while it remains a book, its non-material antecedents are embedded in what I call the Protocols of Care, which are an integral part of the book. Those protocols entailed my seeking permission of the Ancestors to bring those voices forward, which, in turn, resulted in the need to acknowledge another type of authorship on the cover of the book in the words: “As told to the author by Setaey Adamu Boateng.” Some call this collaboration; I, an abdication of the ego. In addition, in moving into performance and the annual collective readings, Zong! throws its many-voiced voice forward into community and collectivity. All this by way of saying that the creation and unauthorhsip of Zong! was a laborious, careful and care-filled act of working with and listening to the Ancestors. Indeed, in their perceptive and helpful comments regarding the translation, the outside reviewer clearly reveals the need for care to be taken with the text. It is, therefore, beyond strange, astonishing, and confounding that that care didn’t extend to consulting with me, but then maybe not; perhaps it was entirely predictable when racism, the everyday, ordinary kind of racism that just doesn’t see Black folX is factored in. What you, Benway and Renata Moressi have done is an utter violation of the care-filled aspect of the work and betrays the ideal of care that is at the heart of the work. For you to talk about “reviews” and “the book remaining on reading lists” is a profound travesty—indeed, it is tantamount to those on board the Zong who decided to jettison their “cargo”, the enslaved Africans, to collect insurance monies. Wesleyan owns subsidiary rights to Zong! and as such has the law on its side, as did those responsible for the murder of enslaved Africans on board the Zong!, the shipowners. There is, however, the letter of the law and the spirit of the law, and it is the latter concept that has been fundamentally breached and betrayed by the acts of erasure of all of those involved in this. I will not be a party to this and will not now or ever give my consent to this translation, which betrays the core principles, ideas and concepts of Zong!, as well as a sacred pact with the dead and the Ancestors.” (July 13, 2021 email).
III
At the Soul Boundary With Lajablesse, Soucouyant and Vampires
They have feasted on our flesh; they will not have our bones!
September 12, 2021
justify the authorize/the could (Zong! #25).
As I lay in bed this morning trying to figure out how to right that which should not have been, how to “defend the dead” (Zong! #15), my mind turned to these stories that did frighten us. Soucouyant coming in your house just like that, without so much as a may I, or can I. Jus so soucouyant floating in like a ball of fire and soucouyant sucking your blood and you knowing that because when you waking in the morning you finding a bruise somewhere on your body. And if you wanting to catch her, you better be leaving rice at the door, which making her stop and count the grains them until you catching her. Some people saying if you leaving salt, it preventing her from coming back and killing her dead dead. And still again some saying that if you finding her skin and salting it she can’t ever put it on again and she dying. We hot footing it to bed after those stories, it was the safest place to be.
I wanting was wanting to feel safe this morning, safe from predatory practices dressed up in finery like the seductive Lajablesse who under all her finery having one cloven foot that striking fear into all those who fall into her orbit; I wanting was wanting to feel safe this morning in a world that appears committed to consuming its seed corn, to extinction no less; I wanting was wanting this morning to feel safe safe, feeling and thinking that the fluffy duvet felt something like my mother’s soft plump body and bed was the safe, safer, safest place to be at a time like this.
Lurking under these memories, however, was the stark awareness that there was another reason why my mind was turning to these stories, being as they are metaphors for what happens in a world where those with power are able so easily to “justify the authorize/the could.” (Zong!# 25). Both these stories (and I hold in abeyance for the moment my thoughts of the prevalence of the female characters in them) speak of predatory and vampiric practices. In using the soucouyant character, I’m in good company, given that the brilliant and late calypsonian griot from Tobago, The Mighty Shadow, beloved by so many, many of us, used the very same metaphor to sing of AIDs and its spread in the population of Trinidad and Tobago. In his eponymously named calypso, “Soucouyant,” Shadow sings: “soucouyant want to suck out the blood…soucouyant suck out yuh blood and tell yuh don’t cry…” And I want to believe Shadow, the Mighty Shadow, that “soucouyant in trouble/vampire in trouble,” these soucouyants who “fly in yuh house” on the wings of “the authorize” and “the could.”
As I lay wanting in bed wanting I want to be safe, pretending that the duvet was my mother’s so soft arms and breasts and belly, my mind turns turning to Bob of Marley fame and the line from one of his songs is running through my head, “sucking the blood of the sufferers”; as i lie there i don’t remember all the words at the time, but the links between what Shadow singing about soucouyants and Marley singing about vampires in “Babylon System” and how Benway Series, Renata Moressi, Suzanna Tamminen, Wesleyan University Press (WUP) and the Canada Council have dealt with my request are brutally stark, as are the links with my and our history, i n i history in this so-called new world, where today the Old World, Europe, incarnate in the practices of these people and institutions reach out their skeletal but still powerful hands to extract from us that which cannot ever be had by them. Marley’s poetry says it so well and so beautifully and all day today this Jamaican griot, bard, prophet who carrying the genius of our tribe has made me feel a bit safer absent a mother’s arms:
…
Babylon system is the vampire, yea! (vampire)
Suckin’ the children day by day, yeah!
Me say de Babylon system is the vampire, falling empire,
Suckin’ the blood of the sufferers, yeah! (Excerpt from Babylon System).
I want now to turn to Benway Series and our exchanges:
In this section I will focus on my correspondence with Benway Series. (There may be some repetition of facts from earlier postings).
On or about May 3, 2016, Renata Morresi contacted me by email to let me know that she was interested in doing a translation of Zong!. It appeared that she had begun the translation because she did ask about sending pages to me, but she had neither a contract nor a publisher and it appeared to me something of a passion project. I told her she had to contact the publishers Wesleyan University Press (WUP) for permission. I heard nothing more from Ms Morresi or WUP until some five years later, on June 11, 2021, when I received an email from Benway Series congratulating me on the publication of the Italian translation of Zong!.
Dear M. NourbeSe Philip,
We are happy to announce that the Italian translation of Zong! is about to go to print. We wish to thank you for the opportunity you gave us to work on your book, a task that deeply absorbed us in the last few years. The team was composed of the two of us for Benway Series, and then the translator, Renata Morresi (also an outstanding poet on her own), and Andrea Raos who contributed to the coordination of the project. The support of the Canada Council for the Arts was quintessential. (Email excerpt dates June 11, 2021).
It appears that sometime in 2020, WUP sold the rights to Benway Series as they are entitled to do by contract. The rights were sold for $150. Neither WUP, nor Benway Series, nor Renata Morresi contacted me about this. According to Suzanna Tamminen, it is not WUP’s practice to inform authors about sale of rights. I do understand, however, that it is common practice to contact living authors when doing translations of their work.
I would also have thought that Benway Series, an apparently well- established publisher of translations, would have had discussions with Renata Moressi about whether she had been in communication with me. What follows is my initial response to them in its entirety which, despite the fact that I had had no knowledge of this translation, is warm and receptive, albeit somewhat confused at the fact that I had had no notice of the translation. I had not yet looked at the translation when this email was sent:
Dear Mariangela and Giulio,
Greetings and thank you for the good news of the translation! Congratulations to you all who have worked hard on this project—I am honoured and I know the Ancestors thank you. It is so important that this work reach European countries, many of which are the ground zero of the trauma that is ongoing.
I am sorry to talk business at a time such as this, but I would very much appreciate it if someone would update me on this. Not having heard anything from anyone since 2016, I had no idea it was going ahead. Was a contract ever signed with Wesleyan? I am copying this to Wesleyan since they need to be involved in these discussions and I will of course be in contact with them.
Once again, heartfelt congratulations. (Email excerpt dates June 11, 2021).
Benway Series replied to me that they had, indeed, obtained permission from WUP. Having however looked at the translation closely, I wrote to Benway Series on June 18th, 2021.
What follows is that letter in its entirety:
Dear Mariengela Guatteri and Giulio Marzaioli,
I once again wish to thank you for the efforts you have made translating Zong! and acknowledge that it has been a long journey for you all. I have now had an opportunity to look at the “translated” text and I regret to say that I am extremely unhappy with it. I wish that somewhere along this long journey that you took, you had thought to talk to me. I wish Suzanna Tamminen had had the courtesy to let me know that you had approached her, so that I could have been in touch with you.
The most important activity happening in Zong! are the silences on the page, not the words. The central and organizing principle around which the words are laid out in the sections that follow Os is that no word or word cluster can come directly below another, thereby allowing them to breathe into the space above. In seeking the breath in the space above, the words echo the actions of those who were thrown overboard the slave ship Zong. They also resonate with the long struggle of Africans to find the breath and space of freedom—from the maroons running from enslavement to George Floyd, whose last words were, “I can’t breathe.” I repeat—the most important activity happening in the text Zong! are the silences which are filled with the unknown and the unknowing, filled with potentiality and possibility. Not the words. These silences, part of the larger Silence must be honoured. Formally and on the page. It is in honouring the formal constraints on the page that we honour the history and memory of the massacre, and, most importantly, those lives de-named, erased, dismissed and lost.
This simple but profound rule is what gives the text its distinctive shape. You have completely ignored that, and, as a consequence, what you have produced is a travesty of the poem and a dishonouring of all that the work is about.
I also want to address the fact that there were poets working on this text. I am surprised and disappointed that another poet would think it acceptable to disrespect another poet’s work to the degree that they would be careless with the placement of words or phrases. This is not how I understand poets to work, understanding as we do the deep and essential work that language does. One important aspect of our craft as poets is precision— precision of placement, precision of words, precision of punctuation, precision in all things. It is how we express care for language, for that is what we do as poets: we care for language and the wonderfully difficult work it does and in caring for language, we care for others, for their lives, filled with wonder and heartache and tragedy and trauma. We care for language, this thing that makes us being-human in ways those enslaved Africans on board the Zong were not cared for and were seen as so much cargo to be dispensed with. Zong! is a deep and profound expression of care for them, such as they did not find at the end of their lives on board the Zong. Unfortunately, this translation, while originating in a place of interest in the work and a desire to share it, continues this pattern of lack of care.
Form is of great importance and significance to me as a poet and Zong! is a work of great formal strength, a quality that was and is necessary to meet the powerful centrifugal—Cesaire refers to it as volcanic— force of the transatlantic trade in Africans (I would include the Arab trade as well.). To fail to honour the formal properties of the work is to mutilate the text (an act we are all too familiar with) and all that Zong! is attempting. To fail to honour the craft of a poet is a profound act of disrespect and reveals a lack of care on many levels.
I also have grave concerns with how the Ebora section has been “translated” and the cover is disappointing and does not do the work justice. All of this could have been avoided had you consulted with me; all of this could have been avoided if Suzanna Tamminen had let me know that she had signed an agreement with you for translation rights. Further to this point about communication, I pulled this off the internet regarding translating poetry:
“Know the poet. If you are lucky enough to pick a living poet to translate, write to him or her. Get to know the person; ask him or her questions about the poem. What was the poet thinking when writing the poem? What does the poet think the poem means? Is there any imagery or language that is repeated? Is there anything symbolic from his or her life? What does the poet think of poetry? The more you know about the poet and his or her life, the better able you are to understand the nuances of the poem. Be courteous and grateful. The poet is answering your questions to help you with your translation.”
I am aware that the desire to translate Zong! comes from admiration for the work and a desire to share the work with a European audience, which leaves me troubled and wondering why I was not consulted. I have my own ideas but I would welcome an explanation from you.
In conclusion, I am in fundamental opposition to the Benway Series publication of Zong! proceeding any further and I will be writing to the Canada Council on the matter and copying this letter to them. I have already been in communication with Suzanna Tamminen about her failure to let me know about the contract and will be in further communication to her. I know this will be a disappointment to you, especially given the time you have put into the translation. I can only trust that you understand my position as the “unauthor” of this story that cannot be told, yet must be told, and which can only be told by not telling. I responded to the call of the Ancestors as one must when they come calling. It is they whom I honour and to whom I must listen. This translation dishonours them profoundly.
Yours truly,
nourbeSe philip
Benway Series’ response expressed regret that my “first impression of (their) work was negative.” They explain their decisions and conclude as follows:
You are entirely right when you say that we, Benway Series and the translator, should have contacted you earlier [my bold]. But please be aware that, although the project has been ongoing since at least 2016, the great bulk of the translation, the editing and the painstaking proof-reading of your book was essentially done during the pandemic, among great personal and professional difficulties, and on a very tight schedule. We hope that we can count on your understanding, and that you will accept our heartfelt apologies. (Email dated June 18, 2021).
Benway Series agrees that they and Ms Moressi should have contacted me. Benway Series does not explain the reason for the rush and the “tight schedule.” I can only conclude from this statement that this translation of Zong! was essentially a pandemic project, which was funded by the Canada Council who failed to do its due diligence to ascertain if the author was aware of the translation.
It is important to note a glaring irony here—the Molson Prize that I received recently was awarded by the Canada Council for achievement in the arts; the Canada Council also funded Benway Series for this publication.
For three months, beginning on June 18, 2021, I have been repeating the same concern: that Renata Morresi’s translation fails to honour the central organizing principle and concept behind the formal properties of Zong!, both of which are irrevocably tied to 1781 massacre on board the Zong; until very recently none of the parties to this deeply problematic, arrogant and essentially racist response to a work grappling with the traumatic history of Black and African-descended people would listen to me.
After my initial exchange with them, I remained hopeful that Benway Series would listen to what I was saying and pull the book, however on August 30,2021, I received an email from Suzanna Tamminen some six weeks after I had written to her on the matter once again, telling me that Benway Series would be going ahead with distribution because they had told the Canada Council they would publish by June. In response to that email, on September 1, 2021, I wrote a letter to all of the parties demanding that the advertisement be taken down from Benway Series’ website and that the book be destroyed. I asked for a response by the end of day failing which I would take the matter public. The following is an excerpt from my letter:
Despite my making my concerns and opposition clear to you all in June of this year, you are still going ahead with the publication on the grounds that you informed the Canada Council that you would publish by June 2021! I will be contacting the office that funded this as well as Jesse Wente the current head of the Canada Council who is himself Indigenous.
From its inception to its end the entire process of this translation mirrors the transactional relations and the racism that resulted in the transatlantic trade in Africans and the Zong massacre in particular; it is a process that makes a travesty of the care and attention that are at the heart of Zong! in both the preparatory work and its composition. Most importantly Zong! and its life in the world constitute a practice that is reparative in intent—reparative of the souls lost in 1781, who stand in for the many, many others lost to this inhumane and insane act of extended barbarity, as well as reparative for those who today continue to mourn them and ourselves. I cannot speak to your intentions but the results of your actions are racist and represent the white supremacist attitudes so prevalent in the publishing world.
The most egregiously racist aspect of your behaviour, however, is your consummate and committed indifference to the rigour of the ideas and theories behind the formal constraints of the work, integrally tied as they are to the circumstances of the massacre. Despite my bringing to your attention the need to respect the form of the work, despite my explaining why the need for the words and their fragments to breathe for those who couldn’t is non-negotiable, despite all this you insist on going ahead. Indeed, the book is advertised on Benway’s website. All of this could have been solved by a simple phone call to the author by the translator, had the necessary respect and care been there. And barely a year after the lynching of George Floyd and the uprising against racial injustice around the world, your actions appear even more deplorable.
You have all failed to honour the dead, the souls at the heart of this work, as you have failed to honour the care and attention that have gone into the preparation and composition of Zong!. I am calling on you to take down the advertisement on your website and to destroy this publication of Zong!. If I do not hear from you by end-of-day on September 1, 2021, I will be going public with this extraordinary act of contempt for a Black and African-descended writer. (Email dated September 1, 2021).
Both Suzanna Tamminen and Renata Moressi responded. Ms Tamminen finally agreed that the form of the translation differed from the original and in fact agreed that the book should be destroyed. It had taken her some 10 weeks to agree with me. An excerpt from her letter follows:
I have looked again at the translation layout, comparing it carefully to the original and I can now see what you mean about the phrases not having enough space, and lines that sit above one another in ways that they don’t in the original. I feel very bad that I didn’t properly recognize this issue before. As I am understanding things now, I am deeply distressed that so many lines of the translation are in effect hindering the breathing of the lines below.
I hope Benway will take this concern to heart, and look again at the translation, and will consider destroying the existing copies. I am very sorry, but I feel this would be the right decision.
Going forward, I hope there will be earnest discussion about the translation process, and a recognition of the importance of the organizing principles of the line spacing as part of the spiritual practice of this work. (Email excerpt September 1, 2021).
Ms Morresi continued to make similar arguments she has made all along, which I will elaborate on over the coming days. Benway Series did not respond. On September 7, 2021, I once again wrote to Benway Series asking for a response. What follows is their letter in its entirety dated September 9, 2021:
Dear NourbeSe Philip,
We write as Benway Series publishing project, without Renata Morresi, in her role as translator, being held accountable for what is contained in the following response, which replies to your comments of September 1:
1. We cannot be held responsible for the manner of proceeding chosen by Suzanna Tamminem. We interacted with her in full compliance with her requests and the terms of the agreement, and the transfer of translation rights led us to believe that you had discussed the terms;
2. This issue has already been addressed by Morresi. We can add that in our experience translations require multiple revisions, but not the inevitable intervention of the author, whose contribution can be useful but also questionable, and certainly limited, given the unavoidable differences in language and context;
3. We do not know the ethnic composition of the committees who evaluated the translation and the value of the project we submitted: we trusted Wesleyan University Press and the Canada Council to be inclusive institutions accustomed to fair practices;
4. The publication of the translation of Zong! is a matter for Benway (not Morresi), and Benway claims validity and legitimacy for the book, both in terms of poetic restitution and in terms of the graphic rendering of the text, which, moreover, has been elaborated and produced with the utmost care;
5. The Italian edition of Zong! is the object of a publishing agreement between Benway, who bought the rights, and Wesleyan, who sold them. Doubts about the book’s quality and graphic rendering must be brought within the scope of this relation and cannot be attributed to identity differences or presumed essences.
We invite you to browse through the book as a material object to fully appreciate the qualities of the work.
Our best regards.
What was written as a living, breathing text, a breath text, if you will, allowing our Ancestors to breathe now as they couldn’t before, allowing us to breathe for them, has now become a “graphic rendering of the text” and “poetic restitution.” And I would weep if I weren’t so tired.
I don’t know how to end this. I began with lying in bed and wanting to feel safe; it is now late into the night and my tiredness is awesome and I want to fall into it and be done with it all. In its letter of June 18, 2021, in response to my first expressed concern about the translation, Benway writes that the publishing house is “a project by poets for poets that makes beautifully crafted books, painstakingly going after every single detail.” What I see instead is Lajablesse, the beautifully arrayed, cloven-footed predator; I see the socouyant and the vampire “sucking the blood of the sufferers,” as Marley sings.
2021 is the 240th anniversary of the Zong massacre and as the beloved poet griot Kamau Brathwaite wrote, “there is so much undoing to be undone,” and it grieves me that this year, of all years, is marked by this disrespect for their memory; that the “material object” of the book is more valuable than, and supercedes their lives, or their memory.
Seeking rest I will return to my bed now with the words of another great Caribbean poet, calypsonian, griot, the legendary David Rudder, to bear me up: “It is a living vibration/rooted deep within my Caribbean belly…the spirit and the melody that sending they soul to the boundary/ever since Europe come and she make bassa bassa/we jamming it.” (“Calypso Music”) I feel as if my soul has been sent to the boundary now, as it has been for us over such a long, long time. And still we must go on, drawing on the vibration deep within us.
I DEMAND THAT THE CANADA COUNCIL EXPLAIN WHY THEY FUNDED A PROJECT THAT WAS ESSENTIALLY RACIST IN ITS OUTCOME!
I DEMAND THAT BENWAY SERIES REMOVE THE ADVERTISEMENT OF THE TRANSLATION OF ZONG! FROM THEIR WEBSITE!
I DEMAND THAT BENWAY SERIES DESTROY THE TRANSLATION OF ZONG!
IV.
The Italian Heist or How a Sea of Negroes Was Captured
Note:
Please excuse any repetitions from earlier posts. These are primarily intended for those who haven’t read the earlier posts. Because of the difficulty in indenting long quotes on FB I’ve put them in quotation marks for ease of understanding.
September 19, 2021
should have/was reduced/retarded/rendered/could (Zong #10).
The last several days have been intensely stressful, even grim at times, with my emotions running the gamut from rage to sorrow and even despair. Walking has always been one of the ways I use to manage stress: with this in mind I set off last night around 9.30 p.m. to walk around the streets of my neighbourhood. Late-night walking has a special appeal to me (I sometimes walk as late as 1 or 2 a.m., although at these times always with my son)—the streets are quiet, cooler and I usually feel that I have the world to myself.
Last night I walked along the familiar streets, some of them surrounding the school my children went to; an unremarkable walk until I saw ahead of me a woman with a dog. They had both paused and with the dog, a big dog, turned sideways, they took up the entire sidewalk, so I waited to see what they would do. They moved on and I did too, still keeping a distance; as I drew closer the woman turned around, saw me and instead of pulling her dog to one side as happens most times, and which I was expecting, she pulled her dog and stepped off the sidewalk. She seemed annoyed with me.
Woman with dog: You could have stepped off the sidewalk and gone on the road!
Me: No, you could have stepped off the sidewalk as you just did.
Woman with dog: Well I didn’t know you don’t like my dog.
Me: Lady, I love your dog! I’m wary of dogs—I was bitten not that long ago.
Woman with dog: Why didn’t you tell me that?
Me: Why do I have to tell you that? You’re taking up the entire sidewalk! You’re just being (expletive) entitled!
Woman with dog: I’m not!
Shaking my head I keep moving, thinking, Lady, you’re so lucky I had a Caribbean upbringing and that my mother raised me not to cuss, warning me against sounding like a jamette—wherever you be, Mum, I know you understanding the necessity of that f-bomb, which I say a lot in any event, and I know you laughing fit to bust. But the incident, oddly shocking in its ordinariness for me and others like me, Black, brown, force-lightened, love-lightened, moving through this city, indeed this world, brings me back to the present situation with the unauthorised translation of Zong! by RenataMorresi and published by BenwaySeries—the very reason I originally set out for the walk. Why did the Lady Karen assume that I should be the one to step off the sidewalk when she was the one blocking it? Where does this sort of sedimented arrogance and entitlement come from? These questions swirl through my mind as I head home—rhetorical questions given that I know the answers—the same place the sedimented arrogance and engorged entitlement of @Renatta Moressi, @BenwaySeries, @MariengelaGuatteri, @GiulioMarzaioli and @AndreaRaos come from. The same place that allows @PaoloSplendore, who several years ago translated some of my work from She Tries Her Tongue…, to respond to my reaching out to ask her if she had any advice to give me on the matter as follows:
“…I was pleased to know that it has appeared in an Italian translation, done by a poet, and I believe a scrupulous translator. Your book is not an easy one to translate and I appreciated the determination of this new publisher, Benway, to do it. There’s very little market for poetry in this country, and it takes courage, as you are no doubt aware, to publish works of poetry as complex as yours in translation.” After expressing how “very sensitive” she is to what I have to say, she ends: “I really have no useful advice to give you.”
Why am I left feeling that somehow I ought to be grateful for the translation, that my concerns are invalid and that I’m somehow responsible for what has happened? “…(W)as the negroes was the cause” after all (Zong! #26), since the translator was “scrupulous” and the publishers courageous.
The conflict between myself, Suzanna Tamminen of Wesleyan University Press (WUP), Benway Series and Renata Morresi has been ongoing since I first received Benway’s June 11, 2021 email congratulating me on the publication of the Italian translation. I had thought and hoped that with the many explanations I had provided over three months, the parties would see what was unacceptable in the translation. Suzanna Tamminen finally came around to admitting that there were differences between the original and the translation that affect the fundamental meaning of Zong!, and actually agreed that the edition should be destroyed. Benway, financially supported by the Canada Council to the amount of some $13,000, the sine qua non of this publication has refused and has been distributing the book.
On June 18, 2021 my email to the parties state:
“The most important activity happening in Zong! are the silences on the page, not the words. The central and organizing principle around which the words are laid out in the sections that follow “Os” is that no word or cluster can come directly below another, thereby allowing them to breathe into the space above. In seeking the breath in the space above, the words echo the actions of those who thrown overboard from the slave ship Zong, sought the air above to breathe. They also resonate with the long struggle of Africans to find the breath and space of freedom—from the maroons running from enslavement to George Floyd, whose last words were “I can’t breathe.”… It is in honouring the formal constraints on the page that we honour the history and memory of the massacre and, most importantly, those lives denamed, erased, dismissed and lost.”
This, the poetics of care, impacts form, content, and many of the other elements of poetry. In the same email I also write:
“Form is of great importance and significance to me as a poet and Zong! is a work of great formal strength, a quality that was and is necessary to meet the powerful centrifugal force—Césaire refers to it as volcanic—of the transatlantic trade in Africans (I would include the Arab trade as well). To fail to honour the formal properties of the work is to mutilate the text (an act we are all too familiar with) and all that Zong! is attempting. To fail to honour the craft of a poet is a profound act of disrespect and reveals a lack of care on many levels.”
In response to those words Renata Morresi writes that she understands “it must be a bit of a shock to see one’s work into (sic) what seems a different, apparently incongruous form. As if (a) I am not familiar with translations, (b) that perhaps I haven’t had any other of my works translated and, most importantly, (c) that this “shock” explains what my profound concerns are with this work of translation.
I talk about honouring the Ancestors and the need for breath in a text that attempts to repair the continual extinguishment of breath, metaphorical and literal, that is so much a part of Black life. She disputes that the translation “has betrayed the foundations of the `source text’.” Morresi describes with great passion, if not compassion, what is happening in Italy regarding migrants crossing the Mediterranean, which I understand. I understand also the urge to do something about these horrors that constitute life today and that contaminate all of us—perpetrator and victim alike. Sometimes simply by virtue of where we live. Which of us who wants a different world, a world with systems and institutions committed to care and not death could watch what recently happened in Afghanistan and not feel profound despair, a desperate aching to help; who among us that dares consider themselves beings who are human did not weep again with Haiti. And we all mourned with Indigenous people as the bones of their children were dug up. Here in the true North, brave and free. For some. We live in these countries where governments take our taxes, ask us to vote and then carry out dastardly acts in our name. More times than not we can do nothing but witness and become Witness, but we are all contaminated. And that was indeed built into Zong!—the possibility that the reader could become contaminated by the text. As we are by the world.
Renata Morresi writes, still in response to my letter and in justification for her translation:
“And before all this, torture and exploitation in the North-African detention camps and then, in this middle passage, sometimes–how many times?–the bottom of the sea. I must admit this: my work with Zong! has been a way to short circuit these facts and those facts, and spotlight the ghastly dehumanization still going on in the name of profit, hierarchy, status. You are perhaps not aware of the debate about citizenship going on in Italy, where people who were born and raised here haven’t got access to Italian citizenship if their parents are migrants. Thousands of young people left without political rights and whose civil and human rights are deeply affected in the name of a supposed hereditary Italianess.”
Much as I appreciate Moressi’s sympathies, it is an astonishingly violent act on her part to use Zong! as a “short circuit” to anything. Zong! clearly has a use value for her, becoming, as Katherine McKittrick has said in an email to me and quoted earlier, a fungible product. That Zong! could exist in and of itself, for itself and in honour of those who died appears beyond Morresi’s understanding. Even as she bemoans the horrors of what is happening in Italy regarding migrants, her extractive act, that she herself describes, duplicates Europe’s colonial project around the world. Nothing outside of their world was considered to be of any value beyond its use value for European colonial powers—nothing escaped the net of extraction, not the earth, not its minerals, not its products, and most certainly not its peoples. In Zong #16, the poem asks: “should they have found/water/&/being/sufficient/…
Tolulope Suma Okunola Kalifa Umm Sisi.”
Morresi makes a fundamental error in creating an equivalency, a false equivalency, I would say, between the transatlantic trade in African slaves and the migrant crisis on the Mediterranean. While there are similarities, the differences are profound: for the enslaved African, for instance, the rupture with their homelands was complete and final, losing family, language and culture. In perpetuity. This is not the case for the migrant, even without the benefits of citizenship.
Morresi urges me not to think that the translation “has been rushed or unadvised,” although the publishers, Benway states in their June 21, 2021 email to me that “the great bulk of the translation, the editing and the painstaking proof-reading of your book was essentially done during the pandemic, among great personal and professional difficulties, and on a very tight schedule.” She claims not to have any other ambition but “to serve (the) work and the people who can’t have access to its original voice/s,” yet at no time has she acknowledged that she understands what I have been saying about the text. Instead she writes:
“Zong! may have many enemies in this country: ultra-conservatives, nostalgic fascists, theo-cons, the populist right, the ‘standard’ racists, the cynics and the elitists who will probably keep on snubbing and ignoring it. In this struggle, it would be tremendously painful not to have the author’s support. Translating is a process that has to do not with what the words say but with what a text does. And surprisingly enough Zong! manages to do many things, even in this format you found so repulsive.”
I am not sure what to make of this paragraph. That she wants to use Zong! in “this struggle” against the right-wing is clear. She also, however, appears to want my support.
This is what Morresi writes on July 1, 2021:
“Let me briefly add something about the translation itself: discrepancies in the alignment were not the result of random choices. Translation is about the negotiation of differences and the differences between the two languages involved a different treatment of the space: I preferred to deal with the clusters as coordinates than to maintain the original spacing, because this would have meant, in some cases, a disruption in the lines. There’s also another reason for this choice: in October 2013 a boat carrying hundreds of migrants shipwrecked out of the coast of Lampedusa, in Southern Italy. More than 360 people died and this tragedy was a turning point in the history of the Mediterranean for many reasons. One of the pilots of the helicopters involved in the rescue operations later described the appalling sight that he could see from above, and how the pilots involved chose the floating body of a woman dressed in vivid purple to function as a reference point (in Italian it’s called “punto nave”, literally “ship point”) to give coordinates and assistance to the rescuing team below. So, I treated the clusters not as points pinned on the page, but as floating points in relation to each other, which could provide a form of help in this moment of danger, even after more than 200 years. I am deeply sorry that this was taken as a misappropriation. Maybe it was, maybe there’s nothing like the past, nothing like the present.”
This is a macabre and distressing distortion of the text of Zong! and one that fundamentally destroys the breath at work in the text. I will only add that Moressi doesn’t realize that in her description of how she “treated the clusters,” she reinscribes the dehumanization of the “woman dressed in vivid purple” who became the “punto nave.”
I repeat— despite my many explanations of what the original text intends, Moressi does not at any point express any understanding of what I’ve said and on September 1, 2021 she writes:
“I invite everybody who hasn’t had the chance to do it yet to compare the original and its translation page by page: they will realize that the Italian version follows the layout of the original in almost every instance. Yes, in a few instances a word or a cluster of words slightly superimposes the word or cluster of words in the previous line, for the space of a character or two, but this is due to the inherent differences between English (an isolating language) and Italian (an inflected language: its morphology makes it inevitably longer) and the need to preserve the integrity of the page… I would lie if I said that this translation was done without having them (migrants crossing the Mediterranean), keeping always in mind their obliterated conversations with history, the survivors’ plea for human and civil rights, and their children’s call for citizenship. I think the dotted line I have traced between them and the victims of the Zong massacre does not erase the voices of your book, rather it makes them resonate further. This is just my perspective, neither formally nor ethically unfounded though.”
Readers can draw their own conclusions from the above; for my part I find Morresi’s tone often patronizing, which is to be expected: the Lady Karen and her suggestion that I get off sidewalk comes to mind. I ask that readers remember the point I have been repeating since June 11, 2021: at its most simple, in her attempt to translate Zong! Morresi needed to respect the relationship between the words and the spaces above them, a relationship which is integrally tied to the events of the 1781 massacre and the honouring of the Ancestors and becomes an act of reparation for ourselves. In other words, the content of Zong! is its form and its form is also its content. The practice of care is thus braided into the form and to separate them is to do a profound violence not only to the text, but to the history and the memory of the Zong massacre. And sometimes all we have is our memories. The practice of care would have meant that Morresi and Co. would have been in communication with me; the practice of care would have precluded a hurried pandemic production of Zong! under the strictures of time as described by the publishers; the practice of care would mean a willingness on the part of everyone to be humble enough to listen to the author of the work about why the present translation is a failure and is therefore unacceptable. What is quite clear, however, is that Morresi had her own agenda—to bring attention to the crisis in the Mediterranean and Zong! became the mechanism she would use to achieve this. My simple question is this: why didn’t she write her own poem? She is after all a poet in her own right. Why use Zong! in this way? We in the Caribbean have a brash saying when someone forces themselves into your life or business: Who sen fuh yuh? Just think—the unmitigated gall of deciding to translate Zong! without any input from me and then criticizing me for pointing out what is wrong with it and not supporting it and not being grateful enough. It’s the step-off-the sidewalk routine all over again. Why didn’t Moressi involve herself with groups who work with migrants —there must be some—or even schools and mentor young migrant descendants to write their own stories.
The September 1, 2021 letter quoted above is not entirely honest, since it’s not just a “few instances” where what Moressi calls slight superimpositions occur—I pulled some 15 pages at random—there are many more—which display many examples of complete disregard for the integrity of the original text. Morresi is clearly more interested in how Zong! can serve the issues confronting the Italian public regarding the crossings from North Africa to Europe, and less about what the original work is really doing and how the form is integrally related to that.
A link appears below to those sample pages and the original text.
As mentioned in earlier instalments, Benway Series admitted that they and the translator should have contacted me earlier and Suzanna Tamminen of Wesleyan University Press (WUP), the original publisher, has also acknowledged the failure of the translation and called for it to be destroyed. She writes:
“I have looked again at the translation layout, comparing it carefully to the original and I can now see what you mean about the phrases not having enough space, and lines that sit above one another in ways that they don’t in the original.
I hope Benway will take this concern to heart, and look again at the translation, and will consider destroying the existing copies. I am very sorry, but I feel this would be the right decision.” (Email dated September 1, 2021) Unfortunately, her recognition came way too late.
On June 24, 2021, I was contacted by someone in Italy who knows Renata Morresi and whom I know somewhat, having exchanged emails about Zong! some years ago. This person asked if I would be interested in talking with Renata Morresi. My response follows:
“I have no doubt that Renata is qualified and skilled and loves and respects Zong! as she has shared, but that is not the issue for me. The first problem has to do with process and the fact that Renata and the series did not speak to me. In a previous email she said that this was out of respect, which I don’t understand. Had she contacted me I would have shared with her the formal requirements of the work.
I have already explained very clearly why the translation is unacceptable. To repeat—it has destroyed the conceptual underpinning of the work and it fails to honour the link between the conceptual form and the traumatic historical events around the massacre on board the Zong!. None of the responses have dealt with this, rather they have been about how much the parties involved love the work, how much time was taken to do the translation, and how relevant Zong! is to the racism occurring in Italy today. The requirement is that the conceptual form of Zong! must be respected and followed in any translation. This is what the text and the memory of those Ancestors need. It is non-negotiable and cannot be compromised.
While I appreciate your desire to help to resolve this matter, if the conversation you are proposing with Renata is intended to try and persuade me away from my position as set out above, it will be a waste of everyone’s time. If it is to discuss whether the translation can be remedied, I am open to discussing this. I do trust you understand.”
She agreed to what I said and I said I would be in contact with her regarding a day and time and that I would have someone there with me. That meeting never took place however: Morresi and I had subsequently had a testy email exchange regarding her copying an email to a third party and neither of us got back to the other.
Five people were involved in this translation, all white, and yet no one thought that it might be useful to talk to the Black, African-descended author, or even send a letter with questions. This erasure of my presence in this heist of Black history, memory, culture and (un)authorship is an egregious example of the ordinariness of anti-Black racism. In a recent interview with Renata Morresi in Italy, as reported to me by an Italian speaking colleague who watched it, I was not mentioned, only the publishers and the collaborators on this travesty of a translation. Further, this colleague has pointed out that Benway Series advertises itself as a bilingual series and that all the books advertised on their website are bilingual editions with the exception of Zong!, which is the only one that appears in Italian. This is yet another way in which the presence of the Black, African-descended (un)author is erased, even as they express concern for Black migrants.
I have asked myself many times why I continue to push for the destruction of this work, even as Benway continues to distribute it. During the production of the first edition of Zong! many years ago there was a setback which meant a delay of a couple of weeks. I was quite upset about the delay until I realized that those who had been drowned had to wait some 200 years for their stories to come to light—the length of my delay paled in comparison and I no longer felt the concern. It was then that I also became aware that although I had left the practice of law, I continued to be an advocate for these souls, so long dead. I have become increasingly aware that this present struggle is also part of the work of Zong! in the world, which I don’t pretend to completely understand. I do confess, however, to a deep longing for this bitter cup created by these events to pass.
Based on Renata Morresi’s correspondence those who carried out this heist obviously believed they were well-meaning and doing something good, but those of us who have lived under the boot of colonialism and now live with its spawn, white supremacy and anti-Black racism, call it what you will, understand only too well the meaning of well-meaning. We understand only too well how the well-meaning doers of good destroyed our cultures and our lives and continue to do so. We understand only too well how experts, like the “scrupulous” translator, officer, or governor were used to justify the terror and the torture that marked Black life for four hundred years. These were the same experts who “proved” our inferiority and scrupulously argued why we were less than and made laws that attempted to dehumanize us. It is still happening.
When I return from my walk mentioned above, I continue to work on this instalment that appears to take forever; in the background the CBC is on: it’s an Ideas repeat broadcast about Dante’s Paradiso, this year being the 700th anniversary of his death. I smile thinking of one of the justifications Morresi provided me for her not contacting me—she thought that I considered Italian a minor language and would not be interested in a translation into Italian because I spoke English, which was this hegemonic language. This anguish that is English; “this/fuck-mother motherfuckin-/this/holy-white-father-in-heaven-/this/ai! ai!/tongue” (Looking for Livingstone), this tongue that commits a rape in my mouth every time I speak. And yet she claims to know my work. I hear Dante’s angels laughing, all nine circles: “Cyah, cyah, cyah!”
It’s ironic that this dispute centres around translation since I feel increasingly unmoored as I closely read the various emails exchanged on this matter, as if I speak one language and they another. I have repeated ad nauseam the fundamental flaw in Moressi’s translation as well as my erasure from the process and no one, with the exception of Suzanna Tamminen, acknowledges what I’ve said. Neither Moressi’s accomplishment or her love and/or admiration for Zong! are relevant to what is at stake here. I am sure Renata Morresi is a fine person and excellent poet with a conscience much needed in this world, but this is not personal; it is infinitely larger than Moressi or myself. Nor should I have to expend the time, energy and money I already have simply trying to get heard, not to mention the toll of the hurt and anguish. I tried to settle this quietly to no avail. This is wrong, it ought not to be happening and yet it is and will continue. Conflict between artists and those who are in the business of art is as old as it is universal. We all remember the artist formerly known as Prince. Black, brown and Indigenous writers, however, have added burdens that come with that sedimented racism I mentioned at the start of this piece.
I was away at a cottage for a couple of days when I first received notice of this publication. “Notes from the Bush” was the subject line of a brief email I sent to a few friends in the aftermath of seeing the translation. It begins with a small example of gallows humour so typical of the Trinidadian personality vis-a-vis those from Tobago.
“Me sitting at the computer working on cleaning up the bs from this translation:
My son: You all right?
Me: (Having worked till 6 a.m. on the letter to all the parties): You see me wandering around the streets muttering to myself, Zong!, Zong! Zong!, you’ll know what caused it…
My son: Be careful, Mum, there are quite a few Black ladies wandering around like that.
Me: I know, I know— that’s why I’m saying it…”
It is 3 a.m. as I sit here working on this attempt to right something that is out of place, something that lists badly, I’m listening to David Rudder singing his calypso, Madness, and I think of the madness that is racism, the madness on board the Zong, the madness that was the Zong massacre: there was/the this/the that/the frenzy/… negroes of no belonging.” The madness of my trying for three months to get Suzanna Tamminen, Renata Morresi, Benway Series, Mariengela Guatteri, Giulio Marzaioli and Andrea Raos to listen to me. To no avail.
The email continues:
“I think with respect to Zong!, they only see the trauma and how that is linked to the suffering of the poor, Black people; they want the passion, as one workshop leader (mixed race) once told me years ago when I said I wanted to talk about ideas—But you people are all about passion! And I add suffering. And persistence. And survival.
This is the language they understand. They want to share the occurrence of these terrible events with other Europeans. I think, however, what they find hard to accept and therefore understand and integrate—much as they are ineluctably drawn to the text, is that there is something—magisterial (odd echoes with magistrate), something serene, something that has to do with majesty at work in the text, even as it deals with the profane, the obscenity and the murderousness of European attitudes to Black and African people. (Added today—That majesty is partially created by the space and spaciousness, the breath in the text.)
As I sit here gazing out at the green, in my mind’s eye I see the Italian text that visually appears so confused—there is no breath, nothing is allowed to breathe, not even the silence, not even the breath. And in so doing they have murdered those souls all over again.” (email, June 15, 2021)
I pause. I breathe…
I AM CALLING FOR THE BENWAY SERIES TRANSLATION OF ZONG! TO BE DESTROYED AND THAT THE ADVERTISEMENT BE TAKEN DOWN FROM THEIR WEBSITE.
I AM CALLING FOR THE CANADA COUNCIL TO EXPLAIN THEIR FUNDING OF THIS PUBLICATION.
Sample pages of Original and Translation
Italian
English
