you translate . . .
Michael Heim: I would like to choose the novels I translate. I make suggestions, of course, but, at least recently, publishers are very concerned with finances and target profitable books. Usually, I have very little say. So whenever I propose a book, I try to use a different approach, but my approach consists in telling publishers why the book is important to a particular tradition and why the English-language public will appreciate it. Quite often, publishers will send me a novel for an evaluation, which I am glad to write—sometimes positively, sometimes the opposite. I think this is a very important side of my work, the “secret” side. The responsibility is enormous. No one has ever published a book I rejected . . . but I cannot say that all the books I recommended were published. The problem is, whenever I recommend a book myself, people think I want to translate it too, even if this is the furthest thing from my mind.
Dorian Branea: What, then, attracts you most about a book?
Michael Heim: The first thing is the language. I don’t want to say that the ideas are completely unimportant. For me, at least, it’s not the ideas in the text that count, but its literariness. What is literature, in the end? I was trained as a structuralist and I think this has given me great freedom of movement.
Dorian Branea: Do you believe that the structuralists were able, as they dreamed, to create “a science of literature”?
Michael Heim: I don’t think that’s the question. I don’t think we need a science of literature. In any case, we don’t need the word “science.” If you want to say science, just do so. The fact that I claim that what I do is “scientific” doesn’t help me at all to read a book. Probably, for those who are in the social sciences it is important to believe they are a branch of science. I don’t care. One example: Bakhtin. His theory helped me to see things in some books—especially Švejk—that I would have missed otherwise. And yet, Bakhtin cannot be applied everywhere, he is not universal. But we don’t need universal answers in literary criticism.
Dorian Branea: Vasile Popovici, in his book The Character’s World, makes a persuasive critique of the dialogical; looking at a series of Romanian and foreign novels, he decides that this term is insufficient, too restrictive, and he offers instead the trialogical, a term drawn from ancient Greek tragedy, where the epic event is viewed from three perspectives at the same time.
Michael Heim: I met Vasile Popovici yesterday, but we didn’t have a chance to speak about this. I will have to ask when I see him next. In any case, it’s true that, in literary criticism, no theory excludes—or should exclude—any other. Marxist criticism, for example, in its ideological form, is awful. Like feminist or psychoanalytic criticism. At the same time, there are many valuable things in each, as long as they don’t claim to be exclusive.
Sorin Tomuţa: Part of your academic career has been dedicated to the study of translation. You are, likewise, a well-respected translator, working from languages that most Americans would consider exotic. Is a successful translation a personal version of the original?
Michael Heim: Anyone who has tried to translate a full literary work, not just a few pages, knows that translation is interpretation. You must interpret in order for the translation to come out well. I could give thousands of examples. Yes, certainly, translation is interpretation, and you can see this best if you compare two translations of the same text. You can tell right away that there are two minds at work on the same problem, each from a different point of view. Two people never translate the same sentence the same way. This claim leads to a part of your question: how can a future translator be taught? In the first place, the translator must be a careful reader of literature, which means he should study not only the history of the literature in which he wants to specialize, but also various techniques of researching or analyzing text, explications de textes.
In my literary translation seminar, I try to bring together students with different maternal languages. I don’t work separately with those who know French or Spanish or German. If you work like that, you tend to focus on what translators call the source language, the language from which you translate. The seminar becomes a language class, rather than one on translation. For me, the target language is much more important in training a translator, the language into which you translate. This is the language that will be read, what really counts. This doesn’t mean that the other language is not important. Of course it is. But only as “a technical detail.” You have to know the language from which you translate, you have to know it well enough to know how much of it you don’t know. In my seminar, students have to bring, every week, a fragment from a literary text they have translated, fragments that we discuss together. We discuss, more exactly, the literary nuances of different English choices. It is amazing that, even though not all the students know the original language, they can find the mistakes exactly, just because the English text is unclear or makes no sense. The one doing the translating can’t see it, because he is too immersed in the source language. So it’s not a problem to work with people who don’t necessarily know the original language. Often I don’t know it, myself. This past spring, for example, students were working from Arabic and Armenian, languages foreign to me, and yet my comments and those from the other students were just as relevant as what we said about texts from French or Spanish. And this method can be used anywhere. In our university, each trimester is ten weeks long, and of course you can’t make someone a translator so quickly, but what you can do is to show someone the work is worth doing more of, in the future. I often see students surprised to discover that they can be translators, even publish. All of the seminars up to now have produced translators who publish translations of major works. I think it is important that all over the world there be a sustained interest in translation, since with this kind of training you create a team of active people, that is, people who will not wait for the publisher to sign a title that has to appear. If every university with a strong Comparative Literature department began to produce qualified translators, they could start to work immediately, and then there would be more opportunities for foreign authors to reach their audience. This is true everywhere, not just in our country.
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Adriana Babeţi: Dear Mike, I don’t even dare ask you my next question. If you tell me there are people in your country who haven’t heard of Dante or Balzac, what can we say about Hašek or Kundera, Kiš or Esterházy? What is happening with Central European literature in the United States? How is it regarded?
Michael Heim: I have said that in this immense mass of people are smaller groups, of tens, hundreds, or even thousands of readers. All it takes is for the works to be translated. Even if they are not read by hundreds of thousands of people immediately—so I tell myself when I translate, to quiet my fears—they will be in the libraries. I once met someone who, on hearing I was a Slavics professor, told me he had just taken a great novel out of the library, by the Serb, Crnjanski: Migrations. He wanted to know if I had read it, and if I hadn’t that I should. You can’t imagine how happy it made me. Or I might see someone on an airplane reading a book I have translated. I’m moved. It’s not every day, but still, it’s happened a few times. Even if the novels sell poorly (an average print run is no more than two thousand, in a country as large as the U.S.), I don’t think this matters. There will always be that loyal “gang,” people who aren’t even aware how exceptional they are. I do what I do for these people. I know that it is important for them to read Hrabal, Esterházy, Ugrešić, Kiš, or Crnjanski.
Adriana Babeţi: How many books from this part of Europe have you translated?
Michael Heim: I couldn’t tell you unless I went home and counted. I haven’t kept track. Over twenty, I think. But I’ve also translated from Russian. A different cultural area.
Adriana Babeţi:
