alerterWhat’s wrong with copying翻译

2021年1月19日发(作者：blaze)
What’s wrong with copying?

----Charges of plagiarism are flying in the world of books. Where does borrowing end
and theft begin? Though disputed, there is a difference.
Every one knows the feeling. In a timely flash, the perfect quip forms in the
mind and rolls onto the tongue. You deliver it to the table, and wait for the gasps or
guffaws. In the silence that follows a dry violence says instead,‖ Yes I read it too.‖

Authors have to wait longer to find out that their words are not theirs alone. But‖
unconsc
ious borrowing‖, as critics call such silent plunder
, is common among writers,
even the best of them. Perhaps because night-foraging by the imagination is so vital
to literature, good writers react warily when, as now,
chargers of plagiarism fly.
Though
naturally
eager
to
protect
their
own
published
words,
and
not
above
a
malicious smile or two when others get caught, most authors recognize that this is
boggy ground. Between imitation and theft, between borrowing and plagiarism, lies
a wide, murky borderland.
Since proving plagiarism is hard, legal redress is normally an expensive dream.
The most that aggrieved authors can catch on is to shame the wrongdoer
. But sham
means attention, and attention brings sales. Recently, Ben Okri, a Nigerian-born
novelist, claimed that Calixthe Beyala, a French one, lifted whole chunks of his 1991
Booker-winning novel, for her bestsellers. Plagiarism means copying delicately the
exact words. His were English, hers French. Showing that a plundered book is not
the only source is also a defense. On the advice of lawyers, he has dropped his case
against her
, and in effect the affair has died.
The personal vendetta carries different risks, as Neal Bowers, a wronged poet
and teacher at Iowa State University, recounts in words for the taking: The Hunt for
the plagiarist. One day, Mr
. Bowers got a fax from California of a page from a poetry
magazine containing, under the name of David Jones, a slightly altered version of a
poem he had written for his dead father
. Worse, he learned, had plagiarized other
poets.
Some
editors
sympathized;
others
did
not
bother
even
to
respond.
Mr
.
Bowers became, on his own admission, obsessed. He lost friends. But in the end he
found the plagiarist, through a lawyer
, only to be offered $$100 in compensation, and
a whining apology.
Copyright
and
self-defense
are
not
the
only
protection
for
authors.
Humble
readers are among their best police. The border between theft and borrowing is also
vigilantly patrolled by scholars. John Frow, a university professor in Australia, has
charged Graham Swift with pillaging William Faulkner
. According to Mr
. Frow ,
Last
Orders
, which won Mr
. Swift last year’s Booker prize , takes liberally from the theme
and the fictional devices of As I Lay Dying .Its topic
—
how people dispose of the
dead
—
is the same . Faulkner’s book has a one
-sentence chapter
, a chapter with
itemized points and different speaking voices in different chapters. So dose
Last
Orders.
That is not plagiarism, Mr
. Frow argues, but ―imitation‖. Mr
. Swift’s fault, he
suggests, is not to have made an explicit nod to the grand old man from Oxford,
Mississippi.



But
there
speaks
a
professor
.
Novelists
are
not
bound
by
rules
of
doctoral

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quotation. The charge by Richard pipes that Orlando Figes pinched finding of his
without
due
mention
has
provoked
a
quarrel
between
these
two
well
—
known
historians of Russia. But theirs is not a row- over literary plagiarism .The allusion of
novelists and poets are different from academic citations. When T
.S. Eliot and Ezra
Pound freighted their verse with learned listings from across the planet, they called
it ―collage‖. Eliot did at times give sources but was laughed at for pretentiousness.
In his Cantos, Pound seldom bothered to mention whose fusty trunk he was happily
ransacking.
Where, then, dose honest allusion, which authors want readers to catch, stop
and sly thievery begin? Samuel Fuller
, an American film director
, put it well when he
said
of
admiring
French
new-
wave
film
makers,
―They
steal
from
us
and
call
it
homage.‖ Questions of
imitation, unflagged quotation and borrowing, unconscious
or not, lead straight to the middle of the middle of the boy. Between mortal pedantry
and wet indulgence, is there safe ground?
Intention has a lot to with it. Poets, especially, are prone to unwitting copying
since
verse
has
mnemonic
properties
that
prose
does
not
possess.
Thom
Gunn,
reading
poems
of
his
in
London
two
years
ago:
―my
greatest
fear
is
that
I
will
discover
or
,
worse,
that
someone
else
will
point
out
to
me ---that
I
have
stolen
another m
an’s words, thinking them my own.

Plagiarists, like forgers, have guilty intent, but of interestingly different kinds.
An
infamous
early
20-century
faker
such
as
Hans
van
Meegeren
wanted
his
paintings taken for Vermeer’s. A plagiarist, by contrast, tries t
o pass off another
writer’s
words
as
his
own.
Forgers
sin
against
authenticity,
plagiarists
against
originality.
There are copying traditions in which originality and its cousin, diversity, are not
only
not
celebrated
but
positively
frowned
on.
Sacred
literature,
with
its
frozen,
canonical texts, is an obvious example. But originality and variety have always been
prized in western writing, burden that they are on authors. Copyright laws date from
the
spread
of
the
printed
book
in
the
16
th

century.
But
interest
in
authorship
is
ancient. All writers hate Homer
, because Homer said everything first. Martial, a Latin
poet and lewd gag-writer
, likened his words to slaves, and an author who had stolen
them to a plagiarist, or abductor
. Varro, a scholar and friend o
f Cicero’s, stripped the
number of plays by Plautus from 130 to less than two dozen.
Most readers want a personal voice, hopefully one that belongs to someone who
has read, thought and imagined a lot. People are maybe more knowing nowadays
about how certai
n ―personal voices‖ come into being. Authors have editors; they
have co-authors and ghost-writers, not to mention models and literary godparents
to borrow from. But the idea
—
or idea
–
of poems and novels as unique, personal
creations is still essential.
It
is
not
hard
to
imagine
two
extreme
sorts
of
writing
where
literary
communication has broken down. One is so private, so personal and so original as to
be hermetic and unintelligible. The other is so repetitive, mechanical and cliché
d as
to
be
empty.
Between
them
is
a
pool
of
shared
references
and
allusions
fed
by
writers, but also by readers. Plagiarists drain the pool; borrowers put back what

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