Acclaimed South African writer Antjie Krog was embroiled in a plagiarism row on Monday after a leading academic accused her of stealing concepts and translations from other authors.
Krog, the author of Country of My Skull, said the allegations that she lifted material from a range of writers, including the late British poet laureate Ted Hughes and two 19th-century European linguists, are an attempt to destroy her.
Stephen Watson, a poet and the head of the University of Cape Town’s English department, made the charges in the New Contrast literary review. He said Country of My Skull, an award-winning account of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission that was recently turned into a Hollywood film, uses words and phrases from Hughes’s 1976 essay Myth and Education.
Krog (53) has denied the claim and said she was unaware of the essay until well after her bestseller, based on her experiences as a radio reporter covering the hearings into apartheid-era crimes, was published in 1998.
Eve Gray, a copyright consultant with the book’s publisher, Random House, said that although one phrase bears a ”striking” similarity to one in the essay, the book is radically different in thinking and philosophy.
She said the claim of plagiarism is an intemperate and personal attack on Krog, a married mother of two based in Cape Town, and that Random House is considering a libel action on her behalf.
The French actor Juliette Binoche played a character loosely based on Krog in the film version of Country of My Skull, which was directed by John Boorman and featured Samuel L Jackson.
Watson also accused Krog of stealing material in her 2004 collection of San poems titled the stars say ‘tsau’. ”Here is a book which belongs not to the history of contemporary poetry in this country, but to the baleful annals of South African plagiarism,” he wrote in New Contrast.
The academic, who on Monday said he stands by every full stop and comma in his article, said Krog lifted the entire concept of her collection from his own book Return of the Moon: Versions from the /Xam, published in 1991.
Watson based his text on a collection of San prose translated in the 19th century by the linguists Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd. Krog did the same but in a manner that ripped off his idea and the work of the linguists, he said.
Gray rejected the accusation as spurious, saying Krog had credited her sources. ”She feels this is an attempt to destroy her. She is not the sort of person who can ride this accusation. She is very concerned to protect her integrity.”
The allegations of plagiarism were first reported in the Sunday Times, which quoted Krog as saying: ”The fact that I didn’t give Watson the recognition he thinks he deserves does not make me a plagiarist.”
She told the newspaper in a written response that the overlap of material in the two books is ”not surprising”, as both writers had worked from the same original source.
”But the fact that he thinks I am a bad poet does not make me a plagiarist,” Krog wrote. — Guardian Unlimited Â