Baron Pal Podmaniczky and the Norwegian Bible | Page 7

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 languages in my town", I thought, "Why not get acquaintance with some of them?" With the help of my somewhat forgotten but hastily refreshed Russian knowledge, I spoke with the representatives of our Hungarian language relatives. Some of them promised to send me a translation after returning home. From that congress I have the following languages translated: Karelian, Udmurt, Estonian, Komi and Nenets. At the congress, I met a Livonian student who is a representative of a small group of people whose language is spoken by only 20 people. He promised me the translation but has not sent it yet. He hasn’t even answered my second and third letter either. In my last letter I asked him to translate the text into Lituanian as well