Baron Pal Podmaniczky and the Norwegian Bible | Page 7

in the directory. What a big surprise! I
phoned her at once. She, too, was so very happy. We met and had an
all-day-long chat about our last 28 years. Naturally she became my
Polish translator. Her friend helped her. For 20 years they had lived
there in America and had been speaking English. Perhaps they could
make a better Polish translation together. I asked them to send me the
translation, but I waited and waited in vain. It is possible she will be
lost to me for the next thirty years33? So I asked another friend, my
first publisher, to translate the text into Polish, my beloved language.
However instead of him, his friend did the translation.
After arriving home I continued to collect languages.
> My colleague at school translated the story into Latin.
> Our friend, a painter, who emigrated to Hungary from Sub-Carpahia,

worked through the Ukrainian, Russian and Ruthenian translations.
> My husband’s colleague, who is of Greek origin translated the text
into Modern Greek and asked her friend’s father to write it down. She
told me she was born in Hungary, so her friend’s father knew Modern
Greek better then she. The same situation exists in the East Indian, the
Latvian and the Spanish languages, that the elder generation speaks it
better. It is remarkably opposite in Rumanian and Tamil, where the
older generation thinks that the younger knows the language better.
> I know a math teacher at the Teacher’s Training College whose
hobby is speaking and teaching Esperanto. Let’s ask her! I will have
one translation in an artificial language as well.
> An other teacher at the College, a soloist of Korean origin translated
my text into this Far East language.
> We had a Peace Corps volunteer in the secondary school one year,
who came from Texas. His mother tongue was Spanish, but he asked
his mother to translate my story into Spanish.
> We have a friend, a member of the Rumanian minority which have
been living among Hungarians for 300 years. He told me that although
his mother tongue was Rumanian, his daughter attended a Rumanian
secondary school, so she translated the text into Rumanian and later on
as a Christmas present, my friend sent me their newspaper with
"The Norwegian Bible" in it. I got 720 Fts for the publication as well.
> I asked one of our Finnish friends to look for a Lappish translator,
and another, a woman, who is Finnish-Swedish bilingual, to translate
the Bible into Swedish. Not she, but her daughter did the job for me.
> Another Finnish friend, a laryngologist translated the text into
Finnish.
> A library director who hosted our librarian delegation in Norway
completed the Norwegian translation.
> I asked my cousin, another granddaughter of our eighteen-lingual
grandfather, to translate it into French. She did it and her 12 year old
half-French half-Hungarian daughter and her French husband helped
her.
> My English penfriend since 1964, who sent me the white New
Testament has a wife of Fijian origin. They promised me a translation
into the language of that far away country.
> An Italian friend translated it into Italian,

> another friend into Croat,
> and one into Slovenian
> a friend of our friends into Hebrew,
> a librarian from Dublin into Irish, and
> the Japanese laryngologist into Japanese. He drew a sketch of me and
my Bible to show that Japanese write and read vertically. He wrote a
long letter as well in which he described his language for my final
paper and in addition he sent me the Japanese Lord’s Prayer.
> My daughter’s 84 year old teacher of German, a nun translated my
short story into German. She presented me with her book which has
been recently published. She translated a German book into Hungarian.
"Translating, playing with languages makes people young."--she told
me and dedicated her book to me. If everybody follows through as
promised, I will have my short story in 32 languages. It is almost twice
as many as my grandfather’s 18 spoken languages.
In May I handed in my final paper with 31 languages in it, took the
state exam and got my degree as Teacher of English. But the collecting
of languages didn’t stop and by Christmas 1993 I had 14 more
languages. I began to look for a publisher and when I found one, I
promised him a book with 50 languages in it.
The story of the later 19 languages is as follows:
> The wife of one of our painter friends, a Bulgarian, who has been
living in Hungary since the age of 11, translated "The Norwegian
Bible" into Bulgarian.
> There had been a congress of Finno-Ugric writers in Eger in
September 1993. "So many