By Virginia Jasmin Pasalo

 

WHEN I was editing a poetry book sometime in 2015, I came across an entry written by a young man whose work was in no way, written by him. The poems were too mature for his young age, his experience did not bear what he had written, the language too sophisticated and reflecting some very old English metaphors, and the context of the poems was, alien to his own culture. His normal writing, based on his Facebook entries were less pretentious, his language, reflecting those of his age and generation. But I lacked the evidence to reject the entry.

With that predicament, I allowed its inclusion, hoping that at some point, he would, with time and more experience at least come close to the original writing he pretended to have written. With that decision was also the prayer that he would not waste the chance I have provided, to better his craft, work on the integrity of his written work, to build his character, and most important, refine his soul.

A friend of mine, historian Fe Mangahas had the same doubts about the originality of certain historical and creative writings. She would remark, after reading the articles, “There is too much inconsistency between his oral delivery and the sophistication of the language used.” Like me, she has no direct evidence. It is an uncomfortable gut feel, disturbing in its gaps.

In Along The Sun-Drenched Roadside translated by Stephen Mitchell, Rainer Maria Rilke, an Austrian poet and novelist, points out: “Ah, poems amount to so little when you write them too early in your life. You ought to wait and gather sense and sweetness for a whole lifetime, and a lone one if possible, and then, at the very end, you might perhaps be able to write ten good lines. For poems are not, as people think, simply emotions (one has emotions early enough) – they are experiences.”

Rilke is known as “one of the most lyrically intense German-language poets”, writing both verse and poetic prose, most often bordering towards the mystical. For the sake of writing a single poem, according to him, you must not only have experienced so many people, things and places to understand and to know, have lived days of quiet and turmoil that evoke intense memories, and that these memories must change “into our very blood, into glance and gesture, and are nameless, no longer to be distinguished from ourselves—only then can it happen that in some very rare hour the first word of a poem arises in their midst and goes forth from them.”

That is when we know that plagiarism was committed in a written work, when there is a huge discrepancy between the writer and the experiences he writes about, when the cultural context and the language used have serious gaps, indicating that the writing had failed to “become” himself. With, or without evidence, we know.

The recent controversy at the National Committee on Literary Arts (NCLA), organizer of the 2022 Gawad Bienvenido Lumbera National Literary Contest (GBL), where three winners submitted plagiarized entries is bad plagiarism. The work of another writer was randomly copied from his Facebook posts, without any effort to edit his words, or the context from which it was drawn.

It is shameful that the “winners” came from the province of Pangasinan, whose poets and writers are seriously attempting so hard to break into the national literary scene to promote its language, people, culture and the beauty of the province. It is shameful because they have copied one of their own, for reasons that could not redeem themselves. It is shameful because it harms the building of identity, integrity and credibility of a province that has embraced upon itself, the duty to become the premier province of literary excellence.

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