Baron Pal Podmaniczky and the Norwegian Bible | Page 6

for me, and with me on a multi-lingual short story. The essay continues on its own.
> The half-Hungarian half-Jordanian son of my husband’s colleague visited us in summer and translated the text into Arabic. He wrote it with very nice handwriting and later on, returning home he typed it as well.
> I sent the text to Subotica to our friend, a laryngologist. He is Hungarian, but speaks Serbo-Croatian as well. He told me it would be better to ask one of his friends, a Serbian by origin to make the translations.
> My niece and her Slovakian husband made the Czech translation.
> My husband ran the Venice Marathon with a Danish runner, so I asked this man to translate "The Norwegian Bible" into Danish.
I took my story and the essay with me to Canada where I took part in an English immersion course. I gave my work to some of our teachers and to some of my new friends. The responses were as follows:
> I gave it to our professor of Canadian literature, a writer. He corrected my essay, praised me and encouraged me to write more. I also had the pleasure of getting acquainted with his first novel "Winter Tulips" which had been recently published.
> The teacher of Linguistics was a Canadian of "visible minority", a young lady from East India, who married a white Canadian. I heard about the problems of being a visible minority first from her, a very authentic source. She promised to have my text translated into her mother language later on by her mother, because parents know the abandoned language better than the second generation. The same phenomenon occurred at other times during my quest for further languages. She sent me the translation, but she did not mention which language it was, and I could not identify it either. So it is the unknown member of my language company.
> Our teacher of Canadian history read my short story and presented me with his article which also, was about languages, the role of bilingualism in the family. He had also written a book about native Indians in Canada, so I asked him to ask somebody to translate my story into an ancient Indian language. He tried to organise it, sent my story to an Indian Cultural Centre to a man who seemed interested. Our teacher promised to make a small donation to the centre, sent the material and waited. And waited and waited. Finally he called them to be told that the man was ill and that nobody else was able to do the translation. He expressed some surprise but in explanation he was told that Indian (Native People) languages are mainly an oral tradition. So I do not have a Canadian Indian translation, but this story is also an interesting contribution to the language map of the world as I try to describe it in my final paper.
> There was a security guard in the College where we lived. He emigrated from Ceylon many years ago. He began to translate my short story into Tamil, but later on he asked his nephew to continue it. He told me he was a stationmaster at home and that his nephew was more educated, so the young man was able to make a better translation.
> I visited my relatives in Toronto. An international company was there at the party. I met a Latvian woman who was already born in Canada, but she promised me to ask her 83 year old father to translate the text into Latvian.
> A great surprise awaited me in Canada. I had a Polish penfriend thirty years ago. She had visited us in Budapest and I was with her on a student excursion in the Polish Carpathians. Later on our friendship was broken off and I knew only that she left Poland for America, but I did not have her address. During a sight-seeing trip to Toronto while waiting for my colleagues, I found a telephone box with a directory in it. A quick idea came to my mind: "Here I am in America, why not look for my friend. Perhaps she lives somewhere here!" And I happened to find her name 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