Stephen Watson’s accusation of plagiarism, directed at Antjie Krog, seems sensational — and was presented as such in The Sunday Times. In Watson’s original New Contrast piece, he certainly does his best to align Krog with Darrel Bristow-Bovey and Pamela Jooste, but on closer reading, his case against Krog is not nearly so clear-cut or so strong.
Watson’s accusation is in fact a cluster of accusations, radiating out from a charge of plagiarism but not limited to straight-forward plagiarism. In fact, the plagiarism issue relates to a relatively small handful of instances: sentences in the introduction to Krog’s collection, the stars say ‘tsau’, that closely echo statements made by Watson himself in his introduction to his own verse versions of Bushman folklore, Return of the Moon; and a few sentences from Krog’s Country of My Skull that too closely replicate ideas and phrases of the late Ted Hughes’s, most notably the concept of myth as “a unit of imagination”.
As far as plagiarism as such goes, that’s about it. Watson is exercised, however, by the similarity of Krog’s Bushman project to his own 1991 work. That’s what seems to get his goat the most, though the idea of putting Bushman folk tales into present-day verse was done by others, such as Eugène Marais, long ago, and is hardly an innovation on his part. In any case, is it really plagiarism to re-use someone else’s idea, while doing it rather differently? All art is built on reworking what has been done before. If such things were declared illegal, the million-rand cookery book industry, for one thing, would collapse. Never mind Hollywood.
But Watson’s real charge against Krog is what this plagiaristic tendency means for her poetry, particularly in the stars say ‘tsau’. Referring to that incorrigible magpie TS Eliot, whose seminal 1922 poem The Waste Land is a tissue of quotations, Watson says the important thing is the degree to which the poet transforms the source material. Krog, he shows, often transposes the original material almost as is, simply making it look like poetry by liberal use of the carriage return. This is obviously in contrast to Watson’s own “versions” from the same source, which are extensively worked into his own poetic language and voice.
Krog’s work here is more accurately seen as appropriation rather than plagiarism. At any rate, her book clearly credits the original Bushmen storytellers, and in its pages gives information on them (which Watson does not do). The book is “selected and adapted” by Krog; she makes no higher claim. Maybe she should have acknowledged that Return of the Moon was one of her sources (and certainly she should have dredged her memory to footnote Hughes), but between Krog and Watson, who is more thoroughly appropriative? Krog’s decision to rework as little as possible is as valid an aesthetic strategy as Watson’s absorption of the originals. Readers who get upset by what they see as the appropriation of another’s culture (an occasionally hot topic in the South African cultural-racial landscape), might see Watson’s approach as the more sinful.
Be that as it may, the strongest thread of Watson’s agument is that Krog is a bad poet. But that’s a different matter, and who will adjudicate? Watson merges the accusation of plagiarism into a demonstration of the worthlessness of Krog’s verse, but he quotes from no text other than the stars say ‘tsau’. (Her defence is that English is not her mother tongue; so why not publish only in Afrikaans?)
It’s tempting to see in this spat an example of the split between modernist and postmodernist aesthetics. The former places emphasis on personality, originality, style, on the transformative value of art; the latter can’t see originality in much, and no virtue in style as such. For diehard postmodernists, every cultural artefact is already a version of another cultural artefact, and individuality a charade. But the discourse around the Krog issue hasn’t yet gone wide enough to encompass such ideas.
At any rate, Krog’s misdemeaours are minor compared to what happens in the other arts. Gerhard Marx, for instance, recently exbibited his exquisite collage/drawings using cut-up maps at Warren Siebrits’s gallery in Johannesburg. Now a BMW ad (see last week’s Mail & Guardian, page 9) has brazenly stolen Marx’s method to create a crass, sexist equivalence between a woman’s body and the handling of a car. The ad industry has been doing this kind of thing for decades, and I hope Marx gets legal and financial redress.
Or, at least, a shock-horror story in The Sunday Times.