Bad Translation

In a thousand years I'll never be able to find this reference, but I swear up and down that the excellent New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chast drew a cartoon titled thusly once long ago.  I saw it in a book, and it made me laugh every time I thought of it for years afterward, and the text even became a running joke which my old friend Bob and I used to repeat to each other at opportune moments.  That text follows here, as closely as I can remember it, panel by panel; just picture the matching illustrations: 

Peter Pan -- what is?

Is pan with personality what flies around.

Is likened by children.

And then another panel that I no longer remember.

All of this is to say that I'm on blogging lockdown for a few days because of an extremely demoralizing translation from the Italian that I'm working on for a forthcoming scholarly anthology.  I've already missed several deadlines, so must buckle down.  Oh, and I've learned a lesson that I will pass on to you here:  if you ever do any freelance work of any kind whatsoever, even if the work you're doing is, for, say, the friend of a friend, draw up a contract and have it signed by both parties.