Former Canadian poet laureate accused of 'borrowing' from Maya Angelou, Tupac Shakur and others

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Canada's late parliamentary poet laureate Pierre DesRuisseaux has been accused of translating several English poems into French and passing them off as his own.

"It's not as simple as the cases I normally investigate of an English-speaking poet taking 90 per cent of another poet's English-speaking poem and trying to brazen that out," British poet Ira Lightman, who investigates plagiarism in his field, told As It Happens host Carol Off.

"It's more subtle. It's a translation concealing that it has an English source."

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DesRuisseaux, who died last year, was the parliamentary poet laureate between 2009 and 2011. Known for his writing about Quebec culture, he won a Governor General's Award for French-language poetry in 1989.

However, the originality of his 2013 poetry book Tranches de vie came under scrutiny after his death when Ontario poet Kathy Figueroa read an English translation of his poem J'avance on the parliamentary website and noticed it bore a striking resemblance to Maya Angelou's I Rise.

Angelou's prose reads: "You may write me down in history/With your bitter, twisted lies,/You may trod me in the very dirt/But still, like dust, I'll rise."

A translation of DesRuisseaux's poem reads: "You can wipe me from the pages of history/with your twisted falsehoods/you can drag me through the mud/but like the wind, I rise."

"I recognized it immediately and just sort of went into shock. I couldn't believe it," Figueroa told the National Post. "It was obvious that he ripped her off. It was blatant, it was obvious, it was appalling."

Figueroa posted her discovery to a Facebook page that Lightman follows, and he decided to investigate further. 

"Especially with a man four or five months in his grave, I'm not going to take one poem on the parliamentary website  and then announce that this is willful plagiarism," he said.

DesRuisseaux died Jan. 18, 2016, in Pointe-Calumet, Que.

"What I then do is try and look as thoroughly as possible at everything by that author."

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He started by downloading a free sample of Tranches de vie online and found 10 other examples of poems that appeared to be translated, without credit, from English works. 

He then asked the publisher, Montreal-based Éditions du Noroît, for a full copy, in which he said he found another 20 or so apparent translations of English works by rapper Tupac Shakur and poets Dylan Tomas and Louis MacNeice, among others. 

"That book is full or borrowings," he said. 

It's not clear wheteher DesRuisseaux meant to mislead readers. His other books, Lightman said, don't appear to follow a similar pattern. 

While Lightman praised Éditions du Noroît for aiding him in his investigation, he said the company should make a public statement about the findings.

"The very word publish and publications is to make public. Having done that without that necessary debt being paid, without those necessary acknowledgements, they then are, in my opinion, obliged to make public too all of the things that are missing from the book," he said.

Éditions du Noroît did not respond to As It Happens' request for comment.