Trying to reconcile the two articles on Krog in the M&G this week, I was forced to the following conclusion: The issue of plagiarism is a red herring – it looks like a turf war, and English-language SA poets are fighting to keep Krog from fishing in their pond.

As de Kok suggests, there is a “perhaps-understandable […] battle for scarce resources” – “a lamentable attitude” that will lead to an “impoverishment of the culture.”

If we are to understand the issue in terms of the “turf war” metaphor, then let’s start by looking at the stakes – what IN FACT are they fighting over? Never mind issues of poetics or literary borrowing – these are the hand-guns and zip-knives of the war – the real, material stakes are:
* publication;
* money;
* repute (fame);
* literary prizes and awards;
* invitations to address local and overseas conferences and symposia;
* residencies in universities, or soft-job honorary professorships;
* the respect that the above generate;
and, finally (and perhaps not least important)
* immortality.

Krog, in the world of Afrikaans poetry, has garnered her fair share, some would say more than her fair share, of all of the above. While she has certainly deserved much of it, it would be naïve to say that the scant resources available are dished out purely in terms of merit. Krog is arguably the most astute mover in the world of SA poetic politics, and the logic of the thing is the logic of fame – the more you get, the more you get. But there is a ceiling for any truly ambitious local working in Afrikaans. Like Wal-Mart or the dealer on the corner, to make it really big you have to move beyond the ‘hood. Krog’s shift into the international world, at first in prose, was met with harsh criticism from the Afrikaner establishment, who felt, it seems, that she was abandoning and betraying them. Now, with the publication of “The Stars Say Tsau” and, more recently, “Body Bereft”, she has expanded her operation into the territory of poets writing in English.

Those defending their turf (Stephen Watson, Chris Mann, Sarah Rudin, Stephen Grey) are all reputable, prize-winning poets. Wars are always lamentable, and there are always casualties. In this case it is reputation and the above list at stake, as they (perhaps unconsciously) see it. Perhaps they are fighting their own potential impoverishment, should the attractor that is Krog gain momentum in the limited world of South African poetry,

“It reconciles the contradictions of these two worlds in a workable fashion and holds the way open between them.”
Krog

“it reconciles their contradictions in a workable fashion and holds the way open between them”
Hughes

Krog said that the suggestion of plagiarism was absurd. She had not seen or read Hughes’s piece before writing Country of My Skull, she said.

I am concerned that Krog’s strategy may in the face of the purported evidence may not be the best one.

Fascinating topic, literary theft. As in the penal code,
there are degrees. These range from plagiarism down to
only being derivative, but all are forms of wrong procedure.

If, on the other hand, you believe that nothing is
original and that all writers “borrow” from “sources,”
there still remains the question of credit lines or acknowledgements.
It wasn’t till “Under the Rose” (1959) that
I could bring myself, even indirectly, to credit guidebook
eponym Karl Baedeker, whose guide to Egypt for 1899
was the major “source” for the story.

Could I, even as I laid down cash for it at the cash register,
have been subconsciously planning to loot this faded red
volume for the contents of a story?
Could Willy Sutton rob a safe? Loot the Baedeker I
did, all the details of a time and place I had never been
to, right down to the names of the diplomatic corps.
Who’d make up a name like Khevenhüller-Metsch? Lest
others become as enchanted as I was and have continued
to be with this technique, let me point out that it is a
lousy way to go about writing a story.