In the last volume of his collected works, Italy and the Mediterranean – no less intelligent, provocative, and graceful than any of the others – Josep Pla writes: ‘The Italian books of Stendhal are pure and simple plagiarism. The anecdotes they contain are magnificent plagiarism. I have always argued that good literature is plagiarism.’ Here we are faced with the enigmatic essence of plagiarism. Another writer, more than a century ago, defined it just as well as Pla, a half-Uruguayan, half-Frenchman who died in obscure circumstances and signed his works with the pseudonym Comte de Lautréamont. This young man, on the verge of death, bequeathed to us a series of epigrams and sarcastic Poésies which are not poems, but paradoxical aphorisms rendered in prose. Among the most striking of these is the following: ‘Plagiarism is necessary. It is already implied in the idea of progress. It clutches the author’s sentence, makes use of its expressions, divests it of false ideas, replaces them with right ones.’
And so the swarthy, hallucinatory poet and the arch moralist of Llofriu are in complete agreement about plagiarism. Plagiarism is, at one and the same time, the keystone of literature and its mysterium magnum. The plagiarism of plots is unimportant: Phaedra, Medea, Antigone are not anecdotes, but mythical, moral archetypes. The plagiarism of details, of dates, of expressions, is more unsettling, because it may, without a doubt, form the basis of great literature. We could even say that bad literature is merely inept plagiarism, a plagiarism ill-achieved. And good literature?
Good literature, I believe, has discovered the essence of good plagiarism, which, being good, is no longer plagiarism. Good plagiarism recognises in extant literary material a part of the fragmented reality the writer has at his disposal. Shall we take a famous verse of Dante’s? Here: Come neve per le Alpe senza vento. This is an improvement on a verse by his friend, Guido Cavalcanti: e bianca neve scender senza vento. Dante improves its cadence: through the introduction of a deft mention of the Alps, through the elimination of the verb, which suggests the quietude of the landscape. Dante’s verse is a re-elaboration that allows us to see with clearer eyes.
Translation, naturally, is not looked upon as plagiarism. But often, it is something more than simply good translation.
I have an anthology, a recent one, of twentieth century Italian poetry. From one of the main contributors, Ungaretti, it includes a translation of a famous sonnet of Góngora’s. The translation is elegant, with a crucial last flourish. The beauty of the woman invoked in Góngora’s poem vanishes with her death: into earth, into smoke, into dust, into shadow, into nothing. Ungaretti translates: in terra, fumo, polvere, niente. The shadow is absent. In this change, we see the mark of Ungaretti, the tribute to his individual way of speaking.
A century after Góngora, a Mexican nun – Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz – looked at a portrait of herself to glimpse therein the shadow of death. She concluded, at the end of the sonnet devoted to it: She is corpse, she is dust, she is shadow, she is nothing. Here, the model is Góngora once again, but the allusive earth and smoke are supplanted by the direct vision of the corpse. In its maturity, the baroque becomes more violent and visionary. Would anyone dare speak here of plagiarism?
9 August 1980