Stephen Watson and Antjie Krog, or The return of the repressed

Johann de Lange

I would lie if I said I wasn’t taken aback by Stephen Watson’s egotistically fuelled diatribe on Antjie Krog in the latest edition of New Contrast. Still smarting from the reception of his own “translations” of the Bleek and Lloyd texts and probably lusting after and infuriated by the kind of celebrity status Antjie Krog has been enjoying lately, Watson feels slighted by Krog’s failure to acknowledge her indebtedness to him – something which I myself fail to see. Two instances he cites of this flagrant abuse – the problem of repetition in the original texts as well as the issue of “endings” needing to be crafted for most of the rambling fragments – are actually rather mundane, self-evident observations just about anybody anywhere in the world working with Bleek and Lloyd’s meandering, driftwood prose are bound to make.

The fact that Krog adapted roughly the same texts as those that he had “translated” into his own blend of romanticising quasi-profound poetry in Return of the moon is also not surprising, since both worked from material available in published form, and both will naturally have mined the material for the best nuggets. His snide remarks on Krog’s romanticising text and context I find particularly rich coming from somebody who exploited the /Xam for his own purposes, and I cannot help but wonder in what way his postcolonial versifications are truer to the spirit of the originals than Krog’s adaptations. What authority does he have that Krog doesn’t? His attack on Krog is motivated by anger that his own writing did not get the recognition (he feels) it deserved – a good example of the return of the repressed.

I do not believe that writers should be forced to annotate their writing – annotation as such doesn’t guarantee that the writing is by definition above board, and neither does Watson’s vague “guarantee of originality, of avoidance of plagiarism”, since “a creative writer's borrowing can be completely un-annotated and yet valid, or heavily annotated and still plagiarized”, as Eve Gray points out in her thorough, methodical exploration of the topic¹. It hasn’t always been the fashion to list every reference, borrowing or influence, but lately demands have even been made that writers “annotate” their writing retroactively – maybe it’s more a kind of backlash we’re experiencing after the excesses of postmodernism.

That said, Krog went out of her way to acknowledge not only Bleek and Lloyd, but the individual “poets” whose work she used. The same cannot be said for Watson. Not surprisingly, Annie Gagiano mentions in her excellent article (“‘By What Authority?’ Presentations of the Khoisan in South African English Poetry”²) that although Jack Cope himself is “commendably scrupulous about acknowledging sources – first the Bushman narrator/poet X-nanni and then the European transcriber – and admirably modest about his own role”, the same cannot be said for Stephen Watson, who “never mentions Cope as a predecessor in versifying the Bleek and Lloyd translations”. Watson also disingenuously called his poems translations – something most readers at the time found problematic.

If Watson had any inclination to be truly scholarly – something one expects from the head of the English department at UCT – he would have conducted himself in a professional, academic manner, without any of the gleeful malice, the kind of hateful pettiness better suited to a character from a David Lodge novel. If he had done his homework to the same extent that Krog did (since he’s so scholarly and she’s not), he would, at most, have been able to disagree with the poetic quality of her adaptations. If he could have put his contempt for Afrikaans literature aside for long enough, he might even have been able to understand that what Krog attempted with her adaptations was the exact opposite of his approach. She specifically did not want to falsify the texts by recasting them in a poetic tradition foreign to the texts and the culture that produced them; she opted to stay as true to the originals as possible.

Krog definitely did not, in any way, try to pass herself off as the author of the poems; she specifically attributes all of the “poems” to their original “authors”. How this constitutes plagiarism is beyond me. What Watson has done is libellous and should not be left at that. If the perception that people like Watson want to perpetuate is that local authors are plagiarising everything in sight, and that therefore it is okay to ruin lives and reputations without as much as an afterthought, I think the time has come for accusers to be held accountable for such reckless behaviour, so that in future they will think twice before running to the media, which typically deals with such accusations in a sensational manner, and with no nuance whatsoever. Actions have consequences, and should have for the accusers as well.

Watson must be a very remarkable human being, springing fully formed from the thigh of literature. How wonderful to know with absolute certainty that nothing you ever wrote contains an idea, a phrase, an image, an insight from somebody else; that your body of thought contains nothing foreign, nothing that is not absolutely your own. Anyway, if anybody should ever find something, God forbid, I have no doubt that he’ll have an explanation handy, peppered with the names of other Great Ones who have gone before.

I believe Watson did himself a great disservice with his diatribe. More than that: I believe he did poetry a lot of harm.



LitNet: 21 February 2006

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