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Editor’s note
Issue Ten included a personal essay by Guido Snel, « On being plagiarized ». Snel’s starting point was his finding of uncredited language from his own academic writing about the Yugoslav author Danilo Kiš, in a biography of Kiš by Mark Thompson. More broadly, Snel alleged that Thompson had plagiarised his « overall argument ».
Mark Thompson recently responded to the ERB about this essay, as follows.
Snel emailed me in 2021 about my biography of Danilo Kiš (Birth Certificate, 2013). He said I had cited more from a 2004 essay of his than the 42 words that I attributed to him. Checking, I found three other words he had also used and 45 from his secondary references – published sources unrelated to Kiš. I apologised and expanded my acknowledgement in the French translation. He was also piqued by having been named in my apparatus but not in my text. I changed this too.
Nevertheless, Snel encouraged your readers to suppose his essay was not mentioned at all in my biography, where it is in fact quoted, referenced and bibliographed for the world to see. Snel even implicated me in this deceit (« he admitted that he had … neglected to cite it »).
Snel’s « most important claim » is baseless. As I told him in 2021, the inspiration throughout my biography was Kiš’s writing. In the chapter that « infuriated » Snel, I took my cue from Kiš’s remarks about Pannonia in an interview (1973) of which Snel seems unaware. My perspective, scope, style, timeline and conclusions are manifestly not Snel’s.
As to the « overall argument » in his essay, I did not notice one. Pannonian and Central European themes are unconcealed in Kiš’s fiction, non-fiction and interviews. Snel observed them, incompletely and without discovering or revealing anything of significance. This may not be my opinion alone. I can find, online, nine essays or chapters about Central Europe and/or Pannonia in Kiš’s work; they were published in five languages between 2009 and 2024, and none mentions Snel’s essay.
Yet he wants to own the discussion. This is very odd, more so as his essay disregarded several seasoned experts on Kiš who had already written on these matters: Karl-Markus Gauss, Jovan Delić, Mihajlo Pantić. (Gauss truly had an overall argument, condensed in a sentence: « The quests for lost childhood and for the lost Pannonian world intersect in the father: the memory of a child’s feelings, long-lost images re-emerging, is the cornerstone of that destroyed building of Central Europe, which forms both the history of the child’s soul and the archaeological traces of an erased continent. »)
Snel’s account of Daša Drndić’s recklessness is equally whimsical. He does not explain that Drndić had silently shoehorned several thousand words from Claude Lanzmann’s documentary film Shoah into her novel Sonnenschein (a.k.a. Trieste). His airy denial of plagiarism on Drndić’s part reinforces an impression that his grasp of the word’s meaning is fragile.
His fantasies about Drndić and me are odious. We were introduced by a mutual friend, not at my request. Over lunch, she spoke freely and touchingly about her liaison with Kiš. A year later, when she was still in fair health, an exuberant email arrived: « Dear Mark, / Your beautiful book came today. I’ll put it (him) by my bedside. 🙂 […] I posted a review on my Facebook page. / Hasta la vista / Daša. » (19 March 2013)
* Karl-Markus Gauss, Die Vernichtung Mitteleuropas (Klagenfurt, 1991). The quoted sentence is my translation from the Croatian edition: Uništenje Srednje Europe, tr. Truda Stamać (Zagreb, 1994).
