> 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 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 husbands colleague, who is of Greek origin translated the text into Modern Greek and asked her friends father to write it down. She told me she was born in Hungary, so her friends 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 Teachers Training College whose hobby is speaking and teaching Esperanto. Lets 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.