Ion Pillat and Emmanuel Lochac: A Case of Plagiarism, Influence, or Literary Parallelism?

In the same year that the well-known Romanian poet Ion Pillat published his innovative book of Poeme într-un vers (“poems in one line”, 1936), a lesser-known French author, Emmanuel Lochac, who had emigrated from Kiev as a child, printed his fifth volume in Paris, entitled Monostiches. Both writers had submitted groups of verses from their volumes for publication in important local literary magazines as an editorial preview. At first glance, the samples seemed so alike that the interwar Romanian literary critic G. Călinescu, in an article published in Adevărul literar și artistic used equivocal words such as “imitation”, “previous models”, and “ideas floating in the air”, and left the matter to be addressed by “the literary historians of more recent things”. Such an insinuation could not have gone unnoticed by Ion Pillat, a consecrated poet at that time who was known for his honesty, both as a person and as an author. Since the matter was neither clarified back then nor in the near nighty years that followed, literary historians today are expected to conduct thorough research to shed light upon the originality of the poem in one verse.