the houses, no one could touch it. And so, when I visited my grandmother in the same year, 1962, she told me about his house. She said, “You are Hungarian,” (she was a great patriot, that’s why she didn’t want to come to America), “and this is your house. You can come here whenever you want.” I went to a lawyer and asked him to send money to my grandmother. I sold the house. When she found out, she started to cry, so I went back to the lawyer. Because I was only 19, not 21, it turned out the sale had not been legal, so the house had never been sold. Later, many years after my grandmother died, I did sell it, and not understanding how business works, I lost all the money. So. Since I had to do business with Hungarians, I began to study Hungarian . . . At that time, I had already started to work as a translator. I had to stay in Hungary a few weeks to resolve some legal problems, and there I met a woman from the state literary agency—another Central European woman who matched my positive stereotype—and we talked about literature; this was my interest. She asked me who my favorite author was. I said, Chekhov. (He still is.) She gave immediately me a novel by Örkény, which I translated right way. Word for word, the title is Exhibition of Roses. I don’t know if it was translated in Romanian, but it is a superb book, really great. A TV reporter wants to film three people in the throes of death, to capture the moment when life passes into death. He finds three people about to die, and he follows them . . . step by step. The novel (actually, more of a novella, a hundred something pages) is a study of the ways art changes life. The moment something is made into art, it is no longer the same as it was before. It is an extraordinarily refined story. I tried to find someone to make a version for television. The text still feels current, not confined to the Communist period. There are some political references, but they aren’t the most important part. It’s about art—television as an art form—and art’s influence on life. I spoke once with the author, and he told me that the idea for the novella came to him in New York, while he was watching a show on a similar theme, and he re-set the story in Hungary.
Daciana Branea: How would you describe your knowledge of Hungarian?
Michael Heim: Every time I translate something from Hungarian, I have to re-learn the language. It’s hard, because Hungarian is very different from the other languages I know, and I began to learn it rather late. I was about forty.
Daciana Branea: So, you know the language more passively.
Michael Heim: Not passively, exactly. A translator must have a more than passive understanding of the language he translates. That’s why I am here. If I want to learn Romanian well enough to translate, I have to know how people talk and to be able to reproduce what I hear. I can do this in Hungarian. I could say in Hungarian everything I am saying now, without it seeming too forced, but it would take a little time to form the sentences, to get used to the language. I have to start from the beginning every time, and every time it gets easier. Still, it is the most difficult language I speak.
Adriana Babeţi: What came after Hungarian?
Michael Heim: Serbo-Croatian, and for a very simple reason: money.
Adriana Babeţi: Like Spanish?
Michael Heim: No, I didn’t make a penny from it. My university was low on money when the person who had been teaching Serbo-Croatian retired. If there had been money, the university would have hired someone else. But at about the same time, I met a Serbian film director, Vida Ognjenović—she taught with us for a semester—who commanded me, “You must learn our language.” I didn’t understand at the time why she had said, “our language.” It was, in fact, a way to avoid saying “Serbian” or “Croatian,” something people still do today. This was in 1984, and it was a problem even then. A deep-seated one, even if no one would have admitted it. Today, it is not possible to use the term “Serbo-Croatian.” We could talk about this, but it is a very delicate subject. At that time, you could still say some things, it wasn’t such a serious issue. So I decided to learn the language. Vida was a good friend of Danilo Kiš, who was looking just then for a translator for The Encyclopedia of the Dead. This was the first book I translated from Serbo-Croatian. I met the writer once in Belgrade and another time in Paris.
Adriana Babeţi: Was there anything after Serbo-Croatian? You’re scaring us already.
Michael Heim: I decided after Serbo-Croatian not to study any more languages. I promised my wife. Because studying a new language meant spending time away from home. And here I am in Timişoara! This is a little personal. I promised my wife I would put a stop to it. But in 1992, I was at a conference in Newark where I met three Romanians: Mircea Mihăieş, Ioana Ieronim, and Adriana Babeţi. I realized there was a gap in my knowledge. I knew nothing about Romania. You asked me about Polish. It would be very difficult for me to learn Polish and to use it, actively, because of Czech, because the two languages are very close. If I picked up a text in Polish—not literature, but an essay or newspaper article—I could understand it. Once when I had to do it, I could. I had to read a book quickly, and I managed. I can read Polish, but only quickly, not slowly. I can understand the topic when I hear it spoken. But with Romanian, even though it is a Romance language, things are not as simple. You can’t read Romanian by knowing French, the way a Czech would read Polish. Whatever they say, no French or Italian or Spanish speaker can read Romanian without some preparation.
Daciana Branea: But can’t they understand spoken Romanian? Can’t Italians, for example?
Michael Heim: Can they? Maybe because Italians want to feel at home in any company. Or it’s their innate optimism. I understand why they might be able to do it more easily than others. But not even Latinity can work miracles, or erase two millennia. So I realized there was an entire area I knew nothing about. Judging by the people I was talking to, it was a fascinating world. I knew nothing about Romanian literature, but with such people . . . Another motivation was that, at that time, a colleague and I had decided to form a working group for Central European literatures and to make a list, to get a clear idea of what was translated into English from this area, what was well translated, what was poorly done and needed to be re-done, what had been done well but was no longer available. In each case, I asked two people for their opinion: someone whose native language was English, and another whose native language was the one under discussion. I had no problems finding people for any of the languages except Romanian. There was no one born in the United States who studied Romanian and Romanian literature. The Romanian person involved was wonderful—Virgil Nemoianu—but he had to do the work of two people. It’s true that there are American specialists—Daniel Chirot, Keith Hitchins, Gail Kligman, Katherine Verdery—who knew Romanian very well, but they are all social scientists.
So I hadn’t found anyone to translate from Romanian literature. This was the second reason, as I later realized. The third was that we had an excellent lecturer, from Bucharest.
Adriana Babeţi: Georgiana Gălăţeanu.
Michael Heim: Yes, Georgiana Gălăţeanu-Fărnoagă. She was in our department, and I could ask her questions. This project took several years. In the meantime, I spent a month in Italy, where I had to give a paper in Italian.
Adriana Babeţi: In Bologna?
Michael Heim: Yes, Bologna, then Padua, in the north. I was glad to learn the language, since I wanted to read a wonderful book, Magic Prague by Ripellino. He created a new genre of literature, also used by Claudio Magris. The book is called Magic Prague and subtitled romanzo saggio, novel-essay. It was a fascinating book. It includes about 150 fragments of cultural and personal history. The book may also be read as an elegy for the past. It was written in ’71-’72, the darkest period of recent Czechoslovak history. I am proud that I ended up translating it.
Dorian
