Friday 1 April 2011

Literally

'And with his eyes he literally scoured the corners of the cell.'
That unfortunate sentence occurs on page 36 (in the edition I'm reading - Capricorn Books, NY, 1965) of Vladimir Nabokov's Invitation to a Beheading. It must have got past both the notoriously fastidious author and his scrupulous translator son Dmitri (not to mention editors and proofreaders). It just goes to show that - in the words of Osgood Fielding III at the end of Some Like It Hot - 'Nobody's perfect.'

1 comment:

  1. I remember my Scandinavian literature professor once fondly recalling her favorite mixed metaphor from a student essay, in which the writer described "a field so virgin that no human eye had set foot in it." That student was apparently in good company.

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