Poet laureate accused of plagiarism
“You can wipe me from the pages of history/with your twisted falsehoods/you can drag me through the mud/ but like the wind, I rise.” Sound familiar?
No, this isn’t famed poet Maya Angelou’s Still I Rise (“You may write me down in history/With your bitter, twisted lies/You may trod me in the very dirt/But still, like dust, I’ll rise”). But you could be forgiven for confusing the two.
The first version appears, in French, in a 2013 book of poetry by former Canadian parliamentary poet laureate Pierre DesRuisseaux, with no attribution. It’s called J’avance (I Rise).
Now, British poet and poetry detective Ira Lightman says the poem is one of about 30 from DesRuisseaux’s book Tranches de vie that bear an unmistakable resemblance to work by Dylan Thomas, Louis MacNeice and even Tupac Shakur.
“It looks to me like a book of deliberate translations,” Lightman said in an interview. “And yet there’s no crediting.”
DesRuisseaux, who died in January 2016, was born in Sherbrooke, Que., and studied philosophy at the University of Montreal. He won the Governor General’s Award for French-language poetry in 1989, and also wrote about Quebec culture and language.
Lightman, who has become well-known for exposing plagiarist poets, believes DesRuisseaux got away with using the work of giants like Angelou and Thomas by translating their poems into French, for an audience that would likely be unfamiliar with the source material. It’s a fairly common strategy among plagiarists, he said.
“When you get an English plagiarist, they tend to borrow from an American poet,” while an Australian might steal from a Canadian, he said. “They’re taking from another country and their target audience … has not read it.”
It was an Ontario poet, Kathy Figueroa, who first noticed something was up in May 2016. She was looking up Canada’s current poet laureate, George Elliott Clarke, when she came across an English translation of DesRuisseaux’s J’avance on the Parliament of Canada website. It had been chosen by his family members as one of their favourite poems of his, but Figueroa identified it right away as Angelou’s Still I Rise.
“I recognized it immediately and just sort of went into shock. I couldn’t believe it,” she said. “It was obvious that he ripped her off. It was blatant, it was obvious, it was appalling.”
Figueroa said she contacted the Library of Parliament, and the poem was quickly taken down. She also wrote a post about it on the Facebook group “Plagiarism Alerts,” where Lightman found it and took up the torch.
Lightman then pored through every poem in Tranches de vie, translating passages that stood out to him and using Google to search for alternate sources.
And he found them. There was When I’m Alone, a slight variation on Tupac Shakur’s Sometimes I Cry, and At the Beginning, a dead ringer for Dylan Thomas’s In the Beginning. And so on.
What really struck him, he said, was that DesRuisseaux didn’t just borrow from famous poets. He also seemed to have taken work from amateur writers who published their poetry online. That’s what convinced him that this wasn’t meant to be a book of translations of some of DesRuisseaux’s favourite writers.
Still, as far as Lightman can tell, DesRuisseaux wasn’t a serial plagiarist, aside from Tranches de vie. “I hope it’s not a trashing of his reputation, because he’s done such extraordinary work,” Lightman said. Other poets are “complete fraudsters,” he claimed — but not DesRuisseaux. Why the Quebec poet would have done this, he said, is a tough question to answer.
“There are people who feel they have to turn out a book every two or three years. There are all sorts of explanations,” he said. “It’s an enigma.”
But Thierry Bissonnette, a professor of French Studies at Laurentian University, who is familiar with DesRuisseaux’s work, said it was possible the book was meant as a “coin d’oeil,” or a bit of a joke, rather than outright plagiarism.
“He was a translator, he translated many AngloCanadian poets,” Bissonnette said. “He would have known that it was dangerous for him to do that, even with British poets.”
Lightman didn’t go public with the allegations of “unacknowledged borrowing,” as he called it, until he was approached by the Guardian, a U.K. newspaper, which ran a story mentioning DesRuisseaux on Saturday. He didn’t want to upset DesRuisseaux’s family in the months after his death, he said.
But he does think the publisher of Tranches de vie, Montreal-based Éditions du Noroît, should make a public statement about the issue. The company is no longer selling the book, since Lightman contacted them about the apparent plagiarism last year, but the company does not appear to have said anything publicly on the matter.
“I think it’s sad that they didn’t,” Lightman said. The publisher did not respond immediately to a request for comment from the Post. Figueroa said she hopes the issue will bring more attention to the plagiarism of poetry and other writing, especially online. She’s been a victim of plagiarism herself, and said many amateur authors find there’s little they can do to prevent it from happening.
“I would like to see … copyright infringement taken a lot more seriously,” she said. “I’ve read the anguished comments of authors … who have discovered that their work has been ripped off. It’s frustrating, it’s infuriating, and it’s just shocking.”
She said DesRuisseaux’s case smacks of a “blatant disregard” for other writers.
“It’s sleazy, you know? It just boggles the mind that this fellow was so arrogant, so sure of himself that he thought he could get away with it.”