The present paper tries to answer the question how translators should deal with mistakes in the original. The first part focuses on true mistakes, i.e. mistakes which the author did not mean to put into his/her original (sloppy writing, uninterpretable sentences, textual errors, inconsistencies of the plot, factual errors, etc.), and discusses the extent to which correcting them is advisable or perhaps necessary. As a special case, the second part of this paper analyses deliberate mistakes, i.e. mistakes that were placed in the original texts for a purpose (conscious phonetic, graphical, morphological and syntactic deformations, such as, for example, Alice’s memorable phrase: “Curiouser and curiouser”) and discusses ways of preserving – or rather reproducing – them in translation.