Please enlighten me about PyPy

[Ray]

Hello!

I've been reading about PyPy, but there are some things that I don't
understand about it. I hope I can get some enlightenment in this
newsgroup :)

First, the intro:

<excerpt>
"The PyPy project aims at producing a flexible and fast Python
implementation. The guiding idea is to translate a Python-level
description of the Python language itself to lower level languages."
</excerpt>

So the basic idea is that PyPy is an implementation of Python in Python
(i.e.: writing Python's interpreter in Python), and then translate that
into another language such as C or Java? How is it different from
CPython or Jython then?

Also, what does "translation" here mean? Translation as in, say, "Use
Jython to translate PyPy to Java classes"? Or "Use Psyco to translate
PyPy to native exec"?

<excerpt>
"Rumors have it that the secret goal is being faster-than-C which is
nonsense, isn't it?"
</excerpt>

Why is this supposed to be nonsense if it's been translated to C? I
mean, C version of PyPy vs. CPython, both are in C, then why is this
supposed to be nonsense?

It seems that I'm missing a lot of nuances in the word "translation"
here.

Also, this one:

<excerpt>
We have written a Python interpreter in Python, without many references
to low-level details. (Because of the nature of Python, this is already
a complicated task, although not as much as writing it in - say - C.)
Then we use this as a "language specification" and manipulate it to
produce the more traditional interpreters that we want. In the above
sense, we are generating the concrete "mappings" of Python into
lower-level target platforms.
</excerpt>

So the "language specification" in this paragraph _is_ the Python
implementation in Python, a.k.a.: PyPy? Then what does "manipulate it
to produce the more traditional interpreters" mean?

I mean, it seems from what I read that PyPy is more about a translator
that translates Python code into something else rather than
implementing Python in Python. In that case, it could have been any
other project, right? As in implementing X in Python, and then
translate to another language? 

Thanks for any pointers!