The reality is more than I could have imagined (Quando la realta sopra la fantasia)

Okay.  Excuse me.  If any of you saw this with a picture and no text, that's how I first saw it, too.  And now here I am trying to add the text and I seem to have lost the picture.  Neither of them work well without the other so I hesitate to continue typing until I find the picture again.  And now I have found the picture, but why is everything that I type being underlined? Unless you have a child under the age of 5, I don't think you can understand how I can be so inept at these computer things.  I really believe that a 5-year old has a better grasp of it than I do.  Anyway, about this photo.  I was at a friend's office and I saw it.  I said that it was a great picture and it became even greater when I heard the story.  The problem is, you didn't hear the story and may have thought that I'd made a mistake by publishing the unusual title.  So, here are the facts.  I'm sure you will find it far from interesting, but since it has been published, I don't want to remove it.  I would rather clarify.

The staple is in fact standing on it's two feet.  It was violently removed from a sheet of paper as staples  sometimes are and when it slipped through the teeth of the staple remover it landed on its own two feet.  It seems relatively impossible to make this happen even if you tried, doesn't it?  A day later we were talking and he asked me how to translate quando la realta sopra la fantasia.  It sounds nice in Italian.  In fact, even in Italian you can probably understand what it means.  So, I kept trying to think if we had a quote like this in English, but I couldn't come up with one.  The most literal translation would be when reality surpasses fantasy, but I didn't like the word 'surpasses.'  So, I changed it to the above title just to try to explain it in English a little better.  Little did I know a day later the photo and lousy translation would show up on my blog.  I'd given him the password in case I was ever without an internet connection (wouldn't you all be lucky that day?) and needed something added or changed never expecting that he might just post something.   He was nice enough to send a text to say that if I didn't like it I could remove it, but by the time I got to the internet I'd noticed that some of you had already seen it and I thought it would be better to keep it posted and explain. Anyway, I still think the photo is nice.  So, what I take from this has nothing to do with the photo or the idea that a staple could land like this. Instead I am preoccupied with the translation.  Do I really speak Italian and a little French?  How many things am I saying that I think make perfect sense that may have a completely different meaning to someone else?  And I'm also reminded of the translations of some of my favorite books.  Who do I really like, the author or the translator?  I think in many cases for me it is the translator that might paint a more unusual picture than the author had intended.  Parts of what make me like a novel are the well-crafted sentences.  A well-crafted sentence is well crafted by the translator, not the author.  It takes some creativity to translate and perhaps translators are enhancers.  However, in my effort to make a more simple, logical sentence out of the Italian quote, I think something was 'lost in translation'.  In fact, maybe I should 'have left well enough alone' and kept the photo on the blog with no text.  We all know that 'a picture speaks a thousand words' better than a thousand words speak a thousand words and certainly better than a thousand translated words.