As a postdoctoral student at the University of Bologna under the supervision of Donna in 2011 and 2012, I had the pleasure to co-organise with her what turned out to be quite a successful international conference on the translation of figurative language. That three-day symposium gathered in Aula Prodi several renowned international scholars, including Umberto Eco, who opened up the conference on a mildly apocalyptical day of the year 2012 (12/12/12). During that conference I presented a paper which was not eventually submitted for the collective volume which Donna and I co-edited (Miller, Monti 2014). Some of the considerations of that talk found their way in other papers I have written since then, but what follows is a restored (and partially re-elaborated) version of that oral presentation, as a small token of my gratitude for Donna’s kind and thorough support during my postdoctoral years in Bologna.