Burlesque-only (who may now seem like a more benign, cultured, dignified, humane, sophisticated, intellectual, and honest prototype for Tweety McTangerine)

SO UNFAIR!!!

is alleged to have described Angela Merkel as a “culona inchiavabile”. This was magnificently rendered in English as

unfuckable lard-arse.

Fine as the original Italian is, this is a splendid translation. Of all the possibilities for culona (“big arse”) and inchiavabile (“unscrewable”), it must have taken considerable artistry to come up with “unfuckable lard-arse”. Imagine the translator, worn down by years of work at tedious political committees rendering the minutiae of financial subsidies, finally able to spread his wings and exercise his dormant mastery of idiom.

Better still, Auntie’s former rottweiler-in-chief Jeremy Paxman raised the issue in his interview with Berlusconi, enquiring in his measured patrician tones,

“Mr Berlusconi, is it true that you once described Angela Merkel as an unfuckable lard-arse?”

Such translation puts in context my strivings to render ancient Daoist texts.