| The Stephen Spender Prize 2015 Plagiarism Case 1 Case 2 Case 3 How translations differ Indicators of plagiarism Allen Prowle's commentaries Judges'comments Plagiarism is a crime Sources Case 1. |
Compilation: Bart FM Droog, December 2015 version: 09-12-2015. This page is part of Droog - online magazine for dry facts and belongs to this article: 'Kopland-vertalingen geplagieerd' |
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| Origineel | Vertaling Groenewegen | Vertaling Prowle | ||
| EEN KORAAL |
A CHORALE | CHORALE | ||
| Volgens zijn tijdgenoten was Johann Sebastian Bach een virtuoos organist – hij speelde met een onnavolgbare ‘Leichtigkeit’ |
According to his contemporaries Johann Sebastian Bach was a virtuoso organist – he played with an inimitable ‘Leichtigkeit’ |
According to his contemporaries, Johann Sebastian Bach was a virtuoso organist – he played with a matchless 'Leichtigkeit' |
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| lichthandigheid zou je het kunnen noemen, maar dan zo licht dat het was alsof het geen handen waren die speelden |
light-handedness you could call this, but then so light that it seemed as if it weren’t hands that were playing |
light-handedness you might call that, but then so light it seemed as though no hands were playing |
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| ik vermoed dat ik wel weet hoe het klonk alsof ik hoor hoe hij het zelf is die daar boven in deze kerk in die kleine machinekamer muziek zit te maken |
I think I know how it sounded as if I can hear it’s the man himself up there in this church in his tiny engine room making music |
I feel I know how it sounded as though I hear him up there in this church sitting in his little engine room making music |
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| je hoort het eeuwenoude mechaniek, het gekreun van scharnieren, het geklepper van toetsen het gekraak van de vloer, het zuchten van wind hoe er van lucht muziek wordt gemaakt |
you can hear the age-old mechanism, the groaning of hinges, the clatter of keys the floor creaking, the wind sighing how music is made out of air |
you can hear the ancient mechanism, the moan of hinges, the clattering of keys the creaking of the floor, the wind sighing how out of air music is made |
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| en er een koraal langzaam door de ruimte zweeft als een onzichtbare gewichtloze vogel Leichtigkeit |
and a chorale slowly floats through this space as an invisible weightless bird Leichtigkeit |
and slowly through this space a chorale floats like some invisible weightless bird Leichtigkeit |
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| © Rutger Kopland From: Verzamelde Gedichten Publisher: Uitgeverij G.A. van Oorschot, Amsterdam, 2007 |
© Translation: Willem Groenewegen From: What Water Left Behind: Rutger Kopland Publisher: Waxwing, Dublin, 2005 |
'Translated' from the Dutch by Allen Prowle |
Case 2. |
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| Origineel | Vertaling Brockway | Vertaling Prowle | ||
| JOHNSON BROTHERS LTD | JOHNSON BROTHERS LTD | JOHNSON BROTHERS LTD | ||
| Vroeger toen mijn vader nog groot was, in de uitpuilende zakken van zijn jas gevaarlijk gereedschap, in zijn pakken de geuren van geplozen touw en lood, achter zijn ogen de onbegrijpelijke wereld van een man, een gasfitter eerste klas zei moeder, hoe anders heb ik mij moeten voelen vroeger toen hij de deuren sloot voor haar en mij. |
In those days when my father was still big, dangerous tools in the bulging pockets of his jacket, in his suits the odours of teased-out twine and lead, behind his eyes the incomprehensible world of a man, gas-fitter, first class, said mother, in those days how different my feelings were, when he would shut the doors on her and me. |
Back then, when my father towered still, in the bulging pockets of his jacket dangerous tools, in his suits the smell of frayed twine and of lead, behind his eyes the unfathomable world of a man, a gas fitter first class my mother said, how differently I felt back then when he shut the doors on her and me. |
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| Nu is hij dood, ben ik ineens zo oud als hij, blijkt tot mijn verbazing dat ook in hem verval was ingebouwd. In zijn agenda zie ik afspraken met onbekenden, aan zijn muur kalenders met labyrinten van gasleidingen, op de schoorsteenmantel het portret van een vrouw in Parijs, zijn vrouw, de onbegrijpelijke wereld van een man. |
Now he is dead and I am suddenly as old as he, it turns out to my surprise that he too had decay built into him. In his diary I see appointments with persons unknown, on his wall calendars with gas-pipe labyrinths, on the mantelpiece the portrait of a woman in Paris, his woman, the incomprehensible world of a man. |
Now he's dead and I am suddenly as old, it strikes me, with surprise, degeneration could be built into him too. In his diary I see appointments made with people unknown, calendars with gas pipeline labyrinths on his wall, on the mantelpiece the picture of a woman in Paris, his woman, the unfathomable world of a man. |
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| Kijkend in het porseleinen fonteintje uit de dertiger jaren met de twee lullige leeuwen: Johnson Brothers Ltd, hoog in het dood- stille huis het droevige sloffen van moeder, jezus christus vader, komen de tranen om nu en om toen, vloeien ze samen in het lood van de zwanenhals, niet meer te scheiden van de druppels uit het koperen kraantje met cold. |
Looking into the little hand-basin of porcelain dating from the ’thirties, with its silly pair of lions, Johnson Brothers Ltd, high up in the dead-still house the shuffle of mother’s slippers, Jesus Christ, father, here come the tears for now and for then – they flow together into the lead of the swan-neck pipe, no longer separable from the drops that come from the little copper tap marked “cold”. |
Looking into the porcelain wash basin from the 'thirties, with its two pathetic lions, Johnson Brothers Ltd, high up in the dead- still house mother's sad shuffling, Jesus Christ, father, now the tears are coming for now and for then, flowing together into the lead of the swan's neck bend, separable no more from the water dripping from the copper tap marked 'cold'. |
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| © 1968, Rutger Kopland From: Alles op de fiets Publisher: G.A. van Oorschot, Amsterdam, 1968 |
© Translation: 2001, James Brockway From: Memories of the Unknown Publisher: The Harvill Press, London, 2001 |
'Translated' from the Dutch by Allen Prowle |
| Case 3 (three more suspected cases of plagiarism) | ||
| Clue 1 Stephen Romer, 'Stephen Spender prize – a judges’s perspective'. The Guardian, Saturday 7 November 2015 (...) The judges – Josephine Balmer, Katie Gramich, WN Herbert and myself – shortlisted all five of Allen Prowle’s superb translations of Dutch poet Rutger Kopland, and eventually chose as the winner the elegiac “Johnson Brothers Ltd”, a moving memory of the poet’s father. (...) Source: http://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2015/nov/07/stephen-spender-prize-judges-perspective Clue 2 In his 'translation commentary' Allen Prowle mentions three other poems of Rutger Kopland: 'Breughel's Winter', 'Time' and 'I Cavalli di Leonardo'. It can be deduced that these are the titles of the other three translations he submitted. Source: Allen Prowle. 'Translation commentary' under 'Open category, commended', Stephen Spender Trust, 2015.http://www.stephen-spender.org/2015_prize/2015_Open_commend_AP.html Clue 3 English translations of Rutger Koplands poems 'Een koraal', 'Johnson Brothers Ltd', 'Tijd' and 'I Cavalli di Leonardo' can easily be found on the internet, since, at least, June 2014* and 'Breughel's winter' even since November 2008* * according to The Internet Archive. https://web.archive.org/web/20140626173715/http://www.poetryinternationalweb.net/pi/site/poet/item/4035 ** http://inwardboundpoetry.blogspot.nl/2008/11/738-breughels-winter-rutger-kopland.html Clue 4 The complete works of Rutger Kopland consist of approximately 500 poems. Only a handful of these were previously translated into English. It can be called rather a coincidence that Mr Prowle choose to 'translate' five of these poems with already existing translations. And all five of them were already published on the internet. |
| Examples how translations by different translators of the same poem differ: In de 'David Reid Poetry Translation Prize (2006-2011)' bogen zich jaarlijks bijna twntig vertalers onafhankelijk van elkaar over één klassiek Nederlands gedicht. Wat in de verschillende versies direct opvalt zijn de grote verschillen. Om dat extra te benadrukken worden onderstaand het beginfragment van een van 's Nederlandse bekendste gedichten, 'Herinnering aan Holland' van H. Marsman, en een aantal van de vertalingen getoond. Zie voor alles over de 'David Reid Poetry Translation Prize én de verschillende gedichten met de tientallen vertalingen: http://subtexttranslations.com/drptp/drptp.html |
| 'Herinnering aan Holland' | |||||||
| Denkend aan Holland zie ik breede rivieren traag door oneindig laagland gaan, (...) H. Marsman (1899-1940) |
Thinking of Holland I see wide-flowing rivers slowly traversing infinite plains, (...) Paul Vincent, 2006 |
Thinking of Holland I see broad lazy rivers flowing through infinite low-lying land, (...) Renée Delhez, 2006 |
Thinking of Holland I see broad rivers going a slow pace through endless low land, (...) Jean Hellwig, 2006 |
Thinking of Holland I see wide rivers flowing slowly through low-lying land, (...) David Colmer, 2006 |
| Possible indicators of plagiarism in poetry translation John Irons, professioneel poëzievertaler en plagiaatspecialist, heeft in de loop der jaren een aantal overeenkomsten in verschillende plagiaatgevallen op het gebied van poëzievertalingen ontdekt. Die overeenkomsten zijn zo sterk dat ze als mogelijke indicatoren voor plagiaat gezien kunnen worden. Irons: Since poetry is divergent rather than convergent in its use of language (denotation and unambiguity are often less important in poetry than associations and ambiguities), it would be surprising to find long strings of identical words in two original translations of a poem. So the indicator here would be: • a high percentage of identical strings of words In order to mask plagiarism, the plagiarist will often resort to shifting syntactic units into different positions in the sentence and/or substituting synonyms for certain words. • shifting of position of syntactic units • synonymn substitution If the original translator has chosen either an unusual word/expression or to opt for a different word for other reasons, the plagiarist often has unwittingly copied this. • the copying of unexpected words or expressions If the plagiarist is ignorant of (the finesses) of the original language, these synonyms often deviate from the main denotation of the original word, or are stylistically wrong. • deviation of meaning/style Furthermore, a lack of understanding of the original means that the changes mark an incorrect shirt of emphasis, or even complete omissions • incorrect shift of emphasis/omissions Deze gevallen doen zich allemaal voor in Prowle's 'vertalingen'. Zie het complete rapport van John Irons over 'Een koraal'/ 'Chorale' op: http://www.bartfmdroog.com/droog/een%20koraal.pdf |
Allen Prowle's commentaries Poetry is essentially an aural form: you read with your ears. It is not just an affinity of experience that makes this poem so compelling for me. As always with Kopland you are immediately involved in a conversation and soon feel part of his intimate circle. You know your way around the house and try to remember which company supplied your own family's bath taps. Thanks to this electronic age I have been able to listen many times to his own reading of this and others of his poems. This has helped me to identify its phonemic patterns and has guided my translation. Dutch is, like English, an uninflected language and relies more on assonance and consonance than full rhyme. I have made frequent use of such slant rhyme, both internally and at the ends of lines, in an attempt to contain the iambic pulse of the translation within a binding structure. In the third stanza, I have translated the original finite verbs into participles in order to convey that sense of irresistible release of memory and feeling Kopland expresses. Allen Prowle Ekphrasis is much loved by Kopland. To my own knowledge this is the only one which is a response to a musical composition. There are several poems which respond to paintings, his 'Breughel's Winter' for example, and 'Time' in which he imagines Rembrandt in the last self-portraits seeing 'where he is going into a distance beyond our eyes'. His trained scientific mind seems to have accepted that the artistic mind was able to reach into places and experiences that defied logical and rational examination. For instance, in 'I Cavalli di Leonardo' he imagines da Vinci, a scientifically inclined artist, meticulously making innumerable sketches of the muscular system, the sinews, 'the whole machinery' that enabled a horse to move, an 'endless series of repetitions' which finally he discards. There are so many things that simply defy any explanation. The organ played by Bach, perhaps in Weimar or Halle, would seem to have been the most unlikely instrument for the transmission of his sublime music. But it succeeded. Kopland evokes the inharmonious din of the church organ in its engine room, counterpointing it with the ethereal lightness of the music that is being performed. My version tries to produce this contrast of opposites by setting lines with a predominance of strong stresses against the final four lines which have hardly any discernible stress. This explains why I chose to end line 13 with the stressed 'how', so that the next line would begin without emphasis and therefore set up some idea of 'Liechtigkeit'. Allen Prowle Source: http://www.stephen-spender.org/2015_prize/2015_Open_commend_AP.html |
Judges' comments (on the Rutger kopland 'translations') Katie Grimich: “Many of the winning and commended entries are translations of works by contemporary poets I had not previously read, notably Rutger Kopland.” WN Herbert: “I hardly knew of Rutger Kopland. But, as with last year, I felt that the winner was self-evident, and that any of these poems could have been it. In fact, 'Johnson Brothers Ltd' brings together almost all the elements admired above: an intense elegiac grasp of terrible change almost as an artefact positioned in time, revisited emotionally in the same way as a poem is re-read. I highly commend Allen Prowle's ability to make this just as much of a revelation in English.” Stephen Romer: “Allen Prowle's versions of contemporary Dutch poet Rutger Kopland, whose wry and moving work delighted us. Of the five translations submitted, three were potential competition winners. 'Johnson Brothers Ltd', a moving memory of the poet's father, emerged as our favourite. Kopland deserves to be better known outside his native Holland, and if the prize draws attention to his work so much the better.” |
Plagiarism is a crime Omdat het plagiaat dat Prowle pleegde gebeurde met materiaal waar auteursrechten op zitten, schond hij het auteursrecht/copyright van de vertalers. Dat recht geldt tot 70 jaar na de dood van de makers. De wetgeving op dit gebied is helder: "These offences [= copyright infringement - dat is wat plagiaat óók is] are punishable by a maximum of two years imprisonment (...) maximum fine of 50.000 pounds.** Voor Nederland: De wet betreffende auteursrecht etc. is te vinden op: 77. Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 |