people from Cuba or Puerto Rico, and you didn’t understand one iota of what they said. They understood us but could not understand why we didn’t understand them. But Spanish became important for another reason: my Hispanic Literature professor would become the most important translator of Latin American literature.
Daciana Branea: Who?
Michael Heim: His name is Gregory Rabassa. He translated One Hundred Years of Solitude, all of García Márquez’s novels. He translated Jorge Amado, and another six great writers who . . .
Daciana Branea: Who translated Borges?
Michael Heim: Not him. The American translations of Borges are very problematic. All of his work has been translated, of course, except for the essays, which a friend of mine is working on at this moment. But Borges, who chose his own translators (and spoke perfect English), didn’t start off with the right people and let himself be led astray by under-prepared translators. One of them—an impostor—called on Borges once, just so he could later claim they were friends.
Daciana Branea: How have American perceptions of foreign languages changed over time?
Michael Heim: Not at all. Or yes, actually, now we think no one needs any foreign languages . . .
Daciana Branea: Except English.
Michael Heim: Americans think everyone in the world should know English. In California, if you want to talk with the housekeeper or gardener, maybe you should know five words in Spanish. No more than five. You can buy special dictionaries: Housekeeper Spanish, Gardener Spanish.
Daciana Branea: Is this politically correct?
Michael Heim: No, but neither are the people who make them.
Adriana Babeţi: And still: Central Europe?
Michael Heim: I began to study linguistics in graduate school because I had learned such different languages, and I liked theory. The same thing happened with music: I was a musician, I liked to play the piano and to study music theory. But after the first week of my linguistics career, I realized I had made a mistake. In the second week, you could still drop a course and add a different one. When people ask why I went to the Slavics department, I laugh and tell them, because it was on the third floor. The French department was on the second. French was—and still is—the foreign language I speak best. I asked for information about their program, but they didn’t give me a second glance, because they already had too many students. The library was on the first floor, Slavic languages the third, and the fourth was German.
Adriana Babeţi: But you never made it to the fourth.
Michael Heim: No, because the secretary on the third was very . . .
Adriana Babeţi: Reserved?
Michael Heim: Worse, blasé. She said something like, “If you’re good enough for us, we’ll know.” So I ended up there. I had majored in Russian, at least on paper, and even if Oriental Studies had been my real specialty, I had worked a lot on Russian. But, back to Central Europe. In the Slavics department you studied Russian literature plus an East European one. If you specialized in linguistics, you studied Russian and two other languages. Russian is an Eastern Slavic language, and the other two had to be Western Slavic (Polish or Czech) and Southern Slavic (Bulgarian or Serbo-Croatian).
Daciana Branea: Did this seem like a more comfortable choice than literature?
Michael Heim: As I’ve said, I didn’t want to study literature because I liked it too much. The same reason I didn’t study music. I thought literature meant so much to me that it would be a mistake to approach it professionally. Work is one thing, affinity another.
Daciana Branea: Maybe we should change our specialties, too . . .
Michael Heim: You shouldn’t make something you like into your job, or so I thought. I studied Slavic linguistics, which was completely different from general linguistics. I could do a little literature, too. I chose Czech. Why? Two reasons. I had heard the Czech professor was very good—when I tell you who it was, you’ll understand. Then, I remembered something my mother had told me about Czechs. When my father was a Hollywood composer, there was a kind of Central European mafia: they wrote the music, directed the films, they did everything. There were many in the business, but you don’t hear about most of them. For example, my father, a newcomer, wrote music for films without ever receiving credit. This happened with everyone starting out, until you rose up the hierarchy. My mother remembered the Czech women, she said most were beautiful, intelligent, good cooks, elegant dressers. But back to my professor. You’ve heard of the linguist Roman Jakobson. Well, my professor was his wife. And Jakobson was our linguistics professor, a wonderful man, he loved . . .
Daciana Branea: . . . his wife.
Michael Heim: He loved her, but they had just divorced. I never saw them together. I was her student, and his. She taught Czech and was a wonderful woman. She was a true Central European—just like my mother had described—not only cultured and refined, but she had traveled widely, knew everyone. So that’s how I ended up studying Czech and learning what espresso was. With that language, it seemed a whole new world opened up in front of me. I decided to go to Prague. My professor was so interesting that I thought all Czechs would be like her. Of course, it wasn’t like that. But that was a good time to visit Czechoslovakia. I got there in ’65, when things were beginning to open up. The Soviet Union in 1962 and Czechoslovakia in 1965 were like night and day.
Daciana Branea: Is that when you met Havel?
Michael Heim: Yes, and this was how it happened. My aunt and uncle visited me that year, I was very close to them. This was the Uncle Leonard I confused for the head of the Citizens Exchange Corps. I told them I was studying Czech. As it turned out, everyone else I told this to thought it was a silly idea. Why would anyone want to learn Czech? No one had heard anything about Czechoslovakia since 1938 and Munich. But my aunt, instead of saying it was strange, said, “Oh, a good friend of mine from school is a journalist and lives there with her family.” So I had a place to stay in Czechoslovakia. That family’s children introduced me to their friends. There weren’t too many Americans around, and I was an American who spoke Czech, so people wanted to meet me. Two weeks after I got to Prague, I was taken to the premiere of one of Havel’s plays. And now I think it was one of his best works, Memorandum, a satire of bureaucratic language, but also an allegory of the entire Communist system. I hope it’s been translated into Romanian. Afterward, I was introduced to Havel as an American guest. But I have never met him again. I admire him immensely, I wrote a detailed study of Letters to Olga, I translated his address at UCLA a few years ago, and I teach his plays to my students (they work very well because they help young people understand how the regime functioned). But I can’t say we are friends.
Adriana Babeţi: How did you come to Serbo-Croatian?
Michael Heim: That happened much later.
Adriana Babeţi: So, in order, what language came after Czech? Hungarian? Why?
Michael Heim: Hungarian, but not for sentimental reasons. I said earlier that my grandparents were part of the respectable bourgeoisie—not upper, not lower—they had a few bakeries. They also had a house
