Italian and its Translation

A word about the Italian on this blog. I like Italian. I like to speak it and write it. However, there are some issues. First, it is not entirely possible to provide accurate translations for the Italian selections; that is, if you were to translate them word for word to English, a lot of the meaning would be lost, or would not quite be the same. For example, the part that talks about the Italian girl with the downturned eyes might get all messed up and you'd think I'm talking about a girl whose eyeballs keep popping out of their ocular cavities, or a girl who has glaucoma, or a girl who has a glass eye. Translations can be tricky. So, I won't always provide translations, but only occasionally will. Second, the aforementioned first point presupposes that my Italian skills are any good, and to be honest, my Italian is actually quite pedestrian. (As an aside, you can take all the Italian language classes you want, but you'll never know as steep a learning curve as being dropped in the middle of the boot-shaped land. "Oh, but English is the universal language," you say; wrong, the universal language is love, so unless you think you can order a Prosciutto panini by batting your eyelashes at the little old Italian man who is already way too weary of all sloppy-faced tourists, you'd better get cracking.)

Anyway, I know all this talk about Italian and translations and "getting the real meaning" might sound silly, so please let me say that the best way for you to get the precise meaning of the Italian selections on this fine blog would be to simply invent some kind of mind-reading machine (or just buy one on the Internet) which uses advanced satellite technology to find specific persons via DNA profiling, obtain some DNA from me, and then once you find me, focus the "laser" (?) energy on my forehead at night when I least suspect it (and hope I'm not tossing and turning from insomnia, thus focusing the energy on some other body part, such as my clavicus); then, you'd simply compile the raw data into usable form and then to English. During this process you'd have to cross your fingers and hope that your mind-reading machine has good Italian-to-English translation "algorithms", or else you're back to the same problem as before.

Well, it does appear that obtaining accurate Italian translations is a lot of work, so why bother? Why make the effort? For the sake of Art? Literature? Even Romance? Those things are pretty much dead anyway, thanks to the wonders of Instant Messaging, cellphones and Reality T.V. So you may wish to close this window and do something more apropos for the average American--google the internet for Lindsey Lohan's HOT new video, "I Gotta Get You Outta My Mind And Into My Semi-Germ-Free Hot Tub And Then Eventually My Lawyer's Office For Prenuptual Negotiations".

Really, I'm sure it'd be more interesting than all this boring Italian culture stuff.