knew English, it was his professional specialty. I decided to translate one of his stories, and when I got back to New York, I sent it to a publisher. It was one of his detective stories. This translation was an important lesson for me. The publisher said that he had read the story and he liked it, but . . . the translation had some slips. He showed me one mistake: I had translated a word meaning “tanned” as “sun-burnt.” A huge mistake, one stemming not from a lack of knowledge of Czech, but negligence of my English. I realized I could never let that happen again, that I needed to pay close attention to my own language. I learned that a translator is a writer in his native tongue, and the language from which he translates is nothing but—as I like to say, in exaggeration—a “technical detail.” Of course, you must know the language you translate from, but if you don’t understand the text well enough, the game is not lost, because you can ask a native speaker for help. The most important thing is to master the language you translate into.
Daciana Branea: When you began your career as a translator of Central European literature, was there already significant interest in the United States?
Michael Heim: Not a trace.
Daciana Branea: So you were a kind of pioneer.
Michael Heim: I was a lost pioneer. First, because my first translation was not good—the publisher was right—then because I was very young and no one took me seriously. Between 1966 and 1968 I practiced with prose fragments, trying to catch the attention of American publishers. I was sure that these authors were very good. But again, I couldn’t find anyone to listen to me. Then came 1968.
Daciana Branea: How were you received, as an American, at that time? It was the Czech “Jazz Age” . . .
Michael Heim: Yes, the Czechs at the time were fascinated by American music and literature. The same could not be said of the USSR, where the propaganda was so powerful that people either believed it absolutely or thought it was completely false and, as a result, thought the U.S. was a kind of inaccessible paradise. The Czechs were much, much more sophisticated. Most of their parents were middle class, bourgeois, from the time when “bourgeois” was a neutral term. Many had suffered during early Communism. Yet, one way or another, they managed. I was born in 1943. If my friends were born, let’s say, in 1943, it means they started school in 1948, the first year of the Communist regime.
Daciana Branea: So they grew up with it.
Michael Heim: Yes, they were the first generation schooled completely by this regime. But of course, they all knew that you heard one thing at school and another at home. In the Soviet Union at that time it was very hard to live, because two or three generations already had grown up under the Communist regime, and many people came from illiterate families. The Soviets taught them to read, then they gave them the only books they were allowed to have. They controlled them mentally, spiritually, intellectually. In Prague, where the people were 100% literate, this couldn’t happen. Everyone knew that they had to hide what they thought. They had had a lot of experience, they had just come out of the Protectorate under Hitler. They knew, therefore, how to deal with the system, and they had learned things from Švejk, as well. They were very interested in America, but I never felt like a museum piece or zoo animal. I was a normal person, with the interests and desires of a twenty-two year old, the same as them. I had just been born in a different world and could teach them a little about it. In turn, they could teach me many things. We developed a very natural, symbiotic relationship. For the same reason, it was interesting for me, as an American, when I came home, to talk to my Czech professor about Prague. She asked me, “What seemed different to you about Czechoslovakia?” What had surprised me most of all, in comparison with the Soviet Union, was how free these people were when it came to sex. In Russia, I never heard anyone mention sex; it was a very Puritanical society. In contrast, people in Prague talked about sex all the time, it was completely natural. They used four-letter words all the time. I learned them right away, no problem. I told my professor how surprised I was by the sexual openness, and she said, “Of course, it’s a Catholic country . . .” This surprised me too, quite a bit, because I grew up in a neighborhood that was 75 or 80% Catholic. An Italian neighborhood. I told my professor, and she replied, “Oh, but there’s no Catholicism in America. American Catholicism is just Protestantism with a pope.” All these things shaped me . . . provincial American that I was.
But to come back to the question of literature—the United States had no interest in this literature, no one had heard of the authors, no one had head of the country—Czechoslovakia—for a long time . . . It may seem hard to believe, but then, we were only dimly aware of the differences between “the Communist countries.” More sophisticated people called them the “countries of the Eastern Bloc” or “the Soviet sphere.” Eastern Europe was a solid black spot—misery symbolized by the gray apartment blocks where people lived. Everything looked the same. And all the countries looked the same. They had simply disappeared from our awareness. They were an imaginary extension of the Soviet Union. And there I was telling the people around me: you’re wrong, where we only see gray and more gray is a vibrant, colorful world. I was speaking, of course, about Czechoslovakia, I couldn’t speak for other countries, I couldn’t yet explain the diversity. But I knew something was happening. Beginning in 1966, a number of Czech films began to become known in the West. They had been preceded by some Polish films. The more sophisticated people immediately caught on that there was something there.
Daciana Branea: This means that the West first discovered Central Europe through film.
Michael Heim: Yes. The first Czech directors to become successful in the West were Miloš Forman and Jiří Menzel. The first films I saw were Loves of a Blonde and Closely Watched Trains, both masterpieces. Then came others . . . But the political situation was the most important part. At the end of 1967, in October, the Writers’ Conference took place and censorship was abolished. Can you imagine? A writers union in a Communist country abolishes censorship, all by itself! Then, in January 1968, when Dubček came to power, the newspapers wrote about Czechoslovakia again. And this counts for something in the States. For example, the literature of the Soviet Union wasn’t well known, either. Even though they were our main enemies, we knew very little about the Soviets for a long time. But when there was a scandal and the newspapers began to pay attention, Doctor Zhivago became a best-seller. The first time I was in the USSR, in 1962, A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich became a best-seller in the States, because of Solzhenitsyn’s politics.
Daciana Branea: You mean that Czech writers became known in America only after 1968?
Michael Heim: Yes, afterward. But it took a while, because we weren’t ready, we didn’t have the translators, we didn’t know who the important authors were. I was lucky, because I was there. Suddenly, people started to listen to me.
Prague, 1968. Photograph by Michael Heim.
Daciana Branea: So you were there, in ’68 . . .
Michael Heim: Yes, I was there when the tanks rolled in. By then I was comfortable with Czech. My major literature was Russian, but I developed a strong interest in things Czech during the three summers I spent there, ’65, ’66, and ’68. During the summer of ’68 I worked on an English-Czech dictionary, providing Czech equivalents of American slang, and was employed as a translator by UNESCO in Prague. I translated scholarly articles, not literature. It was good practice, a good apprenticeship. It left me plenty of time to go out with friends to meetings and demonstrations. I had made friends among some of the leading filmmakers and actors and went to a film or play nearly every evening. It was fantastic:
