Baron Pal Podmaniczky and the Norwegian Bible

Excerpt

My first, and until now, only short story has become a device with which I could make friends from all over the world and create new friendships. These old and new friends have translated my short story into 58 European, 13 Asian and 6 African languages.

Because of its lucidity, "The Norwegian Bible" short story has lended itself particularly well in representing the languages in Europe and some outside of Europe.

As a basis for qualification and description of languages I used the book "Lords Prayer in 121 European Languages" in which the prayers were collected, compiled and the commentaries were written by Zsigmond Németh. All the translations are from a reliable source because they were written by persons who were writing in the language of their mother tongue. The only exceptions are the Esperanto and the other artificial languages and English, because the English was written by me, a Hungarian. The translation into Classical Greek, Latin, Turkish, Croatian and Gipsy was carried out by native speakers of Hungarian. Most friends speak English as a second language, so the language of our friendship was in many cases English. In some other cases the common language was Hungarian, Polish, German, Russian or Spanish.

To some extent I wrote this book for my friends. They can get to know each others language from my book. If anyone wants to learn a language on the basis of the similarity and differences between grammatical structures and vocabulary of languages, they can use my book as a textbook. In addition I wrote this book for my 650 students in the secondary school where I work as librarian and English teacher. They can use it as a reference about languages of the world.

Originally, the book was published in 1994 in 50 languages. In the last 6 years, the short story was translated into an additional 27 languages.

During this time, the 50th year anniversary of the death of my grandfather was celebrated at a memorial session in Sopron and in Budapest Lutheran Theology. I got to know even more about my grandfather from these presentations and came to treasure him more than I had previously. I began to appreciate what a precious treasury of jewels he left for us. I met there many theologians and pastors who were once educated by him, love him still and carry on teaching his nuggets of precious truths.

I changed the theme of the "Appendix" of the first edition of my book and have placed therein an essay which presents the life and work of Baron Pál Podmaniczky, professor of Lutheran theology, lover of God and the World of God. I also included two of his beloved hymns which were translated by him from Finnish into Hungarian, and which are, even today, sung often in Hungarian Lutheran and Reformed Protestant churches. In the Appendix, I also submit an autobiography and a short sport story of mine. And hereby I should like to express my gratitude to Mr. Zsigmond Németh for his kindly permission to quote the most peculiar features characterizing different languages described in his works published and forthcoming respectively The language collecting game continues and I ask you, the reader, once again, to translate the original short story into any language not present in this book, and send it to me....