Baron Pal Podmaniczky and the Norwegian Bible | Page 6

my "Norwegian Bible" in three languages: English,
Hungarian and Slovakian. The next move will be to translate it into
another fifteen or more languages. I think I will ask my friends to do it.
I can not master eighteen languages like my grandfather, but I would
like to have the "Norwegian Bible" translated into eighteen or more
languages.
Until now the "Norwegian Bible" served as a mirror. From now on it
works as a magnet. It attracts languages, and through it gathers my

foreign friends, unknown to each other into a team working 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