No pressure

So yesterday, I get an email from John Norton at Our Sunday Visitor informing me that L’Osservatore Romano just did a story on two pieces I wrote for OSV a couple of months ago. Sez he, “The Pope knows about you now.”

Gulp.

As it happens, I have a friend who knows Italian, so she read the PDF file to us. It was, I am relieved to report, a favorable piece that caught the whimsical tone of the pieces pretty well. I was particularly amused by the Italian struggles to translate American English slang like “kick the bucket” into the Mother Tongue. It is, when you think of it, hard to explain why “kick the bucket” is slang for “die”. So the Italian writer just skipped it and used an Italian slang (roughly translated as “throw out your heart” as near as my friend could tell) to say the same thing. Anyway, if you missed the pieces, they are at the link above, as well as a bit of coverage of the LR piece.

A strange feeling, thinking the Pope is reading your babble with his morning tea.