Poet returns Stephen Spender prize after accusations of plagiarism

Following accusations of plagiarism, the winner of the Stephen Spender prize for poetry in translation has withdrawn his poems from the award and returned his £1,000 prize money.

Poet and translator Allen Prowle took the award last month for his translation of Dutch poet Rutger Kopland’s Johnson Brothers Ltd, about the death of Kopland’s father, a translation described as “superb” by judges. The win was Prowle’s second triumph in the Spender prize, which he had previously won in 2007 for his translations of Attilio Bertolucci’s poems.

But Dutch poetry site Nederlandse Poëzie Encyclopedie claimed last week that Prowle’s submissions this year “aren’t superb translations at all, but blatant plagiarism”, with all five poems he entered for the prize “lifted” from translations by James Brockway and Willem Groenewegen “slightly adapted … and subsequently submitted … under his own name”.

Prowle has since withdrawn his poems and returned his prize money, according to a note on the award’s website, which says that no first prize will be awarded this year.

Poet Bart FM Droog provided a comparison of the differing versions of the winning poem online. Prowle writes: “Now he’s dead and I am suddenly as old, / it strikes me, with surprise, degeneration / could be built into him too. In his diary I see / appointments made with people unknown, calendars / with gas pipeline labyrinths on his wall, / on the mantelpiece the picture / of a woman in Paris, his woman, the unfathomable / world of a man.” Brockway writes: “ Now he is dead and I am suddenly as old as he, / it turns out to my surprise that he too had / decay built into him. In his diary I see / appointments with persons unknown, on his wall / calendars with gas-pipe labyrinths, / on the mantelpiece the portrait of a woman / in Paris, his woman, the incomprehensible / world of a man.”

Droog also published a comparison of the versions made by Dutch translator John Irons, in which Irons says that “if you run a ‘compare documents’ on the two translations, there is a very heavy preponderance of strings of identical words”. “My conclusion is that Prowle is not particularly familiar with Dutch and has used the [Brockway and Groenewegen versions] as a template,” he writes. “This he has attempted to alter, but has no right to call the result his translation of the Dutch poem. If he does so, it is plagiarism.”

Robina Pelham Burn, director of the Stephen Spender prize, which is run in association with the Guardian, declined to comment on the allegations of plagiarism, and said that Prowle did not wish to comment either. She told the Bookseller, which first reported on Prowle’s withdrawal: “All I can say is that Allen Prowle has withdrawn his entries and returned the prize money. You will see that the conditions of entry [for the prize] stipulate at item six that ‘each translation must be the original work of the entrant and not a copy or substantial copy of someone else’s translation; it must not have been previously published or broadcast’.”