On being plagiarized

Three Yugoslav tales of literary theft

Plagiarius is the Latin term for someone who abducts someone else’s children or slaves. The word is from plaga, meaning net or snare: apparently one used a net when in pursuit of human prey, as in a battue. Literary historians credit the first-century Roman poet Martial with the first use of the term plagium — making the leap from theft of a human to literary theft. It was not a legal leap: Roman law did not have a term, nor a punishment, for the theft of a verse. Martial had minted a metaphor, and a hyperbolic one, for surely the Romans too would rather have their verses than their children stolen (leaving aside the abduction of slaves, which the modern imagination is less likely to put in the same category).

In all European languages today, « plagiarism » means, well, plagiarism. It does not mean kidnapping, much less slavenapping. This includes the linguistic realm of Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, and Serbian (one language with four centers). If a child is abducted, one speaks of otmica, or more popularly, of kidnapiranje or kidnapovanje. But if, as in my case, your intellectual or literary property has been stolen, it is called plainly for what it is: plagijat. The term endured; the metaphor was forgotten.

Back in 2022 I gathered an anthology of essays and autobiographical prose by the Yugoslav writer Danilo Kiš. Kiš was born in 1935 in Subotica (in what was then the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, now Serbia) and died in 1989 in Paris (in what is still France). The Kingdom of Yugoslavia gave way, in 1945, to the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, which would dissolve two years after Kiš’s death, and so Kiš was dubbed the « last Yugoslav writer », most likely by his friend, the Hungarian writer István Eörsi. His demise, as Susan Sontag wrote in her preface to a posthumous collection of his essays and interviews, « cut short one of the most important journeys in literature made by any writer during the second half of the twentieth century. »¹ My anthology was to be published by the Dutch Arbeiderspers, in a longstanding and prestigious series called Privédomein (private domain). That series represents a small and enviable canon of European diaries and other forms of autobiographical prose. Although, « European »? The French were there, the Germans, the Italians and Spanish, the Scandinavians, obviously the Anglo-Saxons (in abundance), and inevitably the Russians. But where, I had wondered, were the Czechs, the Poles, the Hungarians, let alone the poor tribe that had balkanized into Bosnians, Croats, Montenegrins, Serbs, Kosovars? I flattered myself that Kiš himself would have enjoyed the historical justice seeing his work published in a canon that hitherto had overlooked the literatures of Central and Eastern Europe.