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  • The Elegant Variation is "Fowler’s (1926, 1965) term for the inept writer’s overstrained efforts at freshness or vividness of expression. Prose guilty of elegant variation calls attention to itself and doesn’t permit its ideas to seem naturally clear. It typically seeks fancy new words for familiar things, and it scrambles for synonyms in order to avoid at all costs repeating a word, even though repetition might be the natural, normal thing to do: The audience had a certain bovine placidity, instead of The audience was as placid as cows. Elegant variation is often the rock, and a stereotype, a cliché, or a tired metaphor the hard place between which inexperienced or foolish writers come to grief. The familiar middle ground in treating these homely topics is almost always the safest. In untrained or unrestrained hands, a thesaurus can be dangerous."
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February 05, 2008

NOBEL PLAGIARIST?

Did the Nobel Prize winning Spanish author Camilo José Cela commit plagiarism?  The question is coming up before Barcelona's Constitutional Court.

Cela was a controversial figure whose best-known works are The Hive and The Family of Pasqual Duarte. The latter won him the Nobel Prize in 1989. The Nobel jury described it as the most popular work of Spanish fiction since Miguel Cervantes' 400-year-old Don Quixote. La Cruz de San Andrés won Cela the Planeta prize, one of Spain's top literary awards and made the writer 50m pesetas (then £225,000).

But Ms Formoso, herself an award-winning writer, claimed large parts were lifted from her novel and took the ageing literary legend to court. The case started in 2001 but was never resolved before Cela's death.

Posted by TEV at 12:15 AM in World Beat |

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