perche e pazzo ... wha?

To prepare for my second year of Italian and another go-around with the instructor who screwed me over last spring, I'm spending this last summer month reading Jeffrey Deaver's "La Sedia Vuota" as a dual-text with its English-language original, "The Empty Chair." So far I get most of what's going on and it's really helpful in verb conjugation. Mein Gott, but they sure use fare a lot in Italy. Fare, stare and essere ... mamma. What's kind of nutty are the parts in the Italian version that are not in the English one. There are whole paragraphs (3, count-em, 3 so far) that don't have an English equivalent. I could see it going the other way and having parts that were edited out. That's assuming that Jeffrey Deaver wrote it in English first and then it was translated into Italian and not the other way around. Hell, maybe I'm wrong. I don't know. Or maybe these sections were in the hardcover and didn't make it into the paperback. Non lo so. E un mistero.

The best part is coming across an idiosyncrasy that didn't translate well. Oh sure, the translator is great with changing miles to kilometers (although 500 miles = 800 kilometers? That seems weird, but it's math, so how would I know), but cultural references seem to be too obscure for them to track down and translate properly:

English: ... flashing vividly back on the most gruesome scenes from the ... novels she read late at night with her companion, a pint of Ben & Jerry's.

Italian: ... the vivid imagination ... from the novels she had read with her companion, drinking a bottle of Ben & Jerry's.

A pint's a pint, I guess. And it's nice that the Italian version has her drinking with a companion rather than have the pint as the companion. There's a nice correction for you, Deaver. He's so mean to overweight single women.

Damn that fecking kid next door is screaming again ... he's got issues and I've got issues with his issues.