This collection is a biography and appreciation, a portrait of a man between languages who expanded the possibilities of a life in translation.
The collection demonstrates this range of possibility in its form. Rather than a single-author biography, our book is a composite, a thick description of Heim’s career from both his own perspective and those of the many authors, translators, and publishers whose work he affected. By placing one version of Heim’s influence alongside another, our approach to biography resembles the way we might compare a translation to an original, in order to see the translator’s work come to light in the space between. Heim ranged across many domains and is important to many people. The collection of voices in this volume, therefore, is modeled on Heim’s own definition of translation. “A good translation,” he stated, “will allow a person who has read the work in the original and a person who has read the work in translation to have an intelligent conversation about it.”1 He emphasizes not narrow textual questions but the beginning of a dialog, the international community of readers a translation creates. Anyone who met Heim would recognize in this definition his characteristic, expansive generosity, a movement toward inclusion. This collection is not a Festschrift, but a conversation.2 This collection emulates both his translation practice and his generosity, by telling his story in many voices, which come from the many areas where Heim made translation important.
Heim’s work was dedicated to improving our practice and understanding of translation, and a book dedicated to him allows us to improve the field of Translation Studies. A focus on the complex constitution of a translator has been lacking from the wave of interest in translation that began in the 1970s and swelled in the past two decades. Heim was a part of this wave, which shifted translation from a domain of language training and linguistics (the field of his graduate work) to comparative literature, cultural studies, and creative writing. The first two fields, in particular, have become allergic to biographical approaches. Works such as Siting Translation by Tejaswini Niranjana, The Practice of Diaspora by Brent Hayes Edwards, or The Translator’s Invisibility by Lawrence Venuti have documented the roles translators play in resistance to colonial and patriarchal power structures, networks of cultural exchange, or challenges to the primacy of authorship, while focusing overwhelmingly on the power structure, network, or signature, at the expense of the translator figure. Emblematic of this elision is Paul de Man’s 1983 definition: “the relationship of translator to the original is the relationship between language and language.”3 The equation of the translator and language is an indication of Translation Studies’ lagging attachment to its roots in structural linguistics. In the same way that Saussure’s sign gains meaning only within the context of a larger language system, the translator has been appreciated as an element within these power networks. Only recently have studies addressed “the great scandal of translation” that Gayatri Spivak identifies as “the obliteration of the figure of the translator.”4 A more humanist approach should ask how a life endows a person with the complex set of skills literary translation requires, and in what ways might a person live through translation? Although some new works have come to this human focus—such as the collection Barbara Wright: Translation as Art, edited by Debra Kelly and Madeleine Renouard, or Iliya Troyanov’s fictional biography of Richard Burton, The Collector of Worlds, or even the documentary films Translating Edwin Honig: A Poet’s Alzheimer’s (by Alan Berliner) or Nurith Aviv’s Traduire, or Vadim Jendreyko’s Woman with the Five Elephants, about Svetlana Geier, translator of Dostoyevsky into German—translators’ lives rarely receive more than a portrait, not a book-length study.
Even this intellectual context, however, has not diminished our interest in the author biography. Translators lag behind our long-standing interest in authors, who seem more creative and more miraculous than a person who, we might naïvely think, simply copies a creative work down in another language. The author’s life promises the key to unlock his works. “Ultimately what the biographer seeks to elicit,” writes Richard Ellmann in his landmark Golden Codgers, “is less the events of a writer’s life than the ‘mysterious armature,’ as Mallarmé called it, which binds the creative work.”5 Yet even Ellmann’s translation of Mallarmé in this passage relies on a definition of “armature” as “skeleton,” which appears in English only in 1903, five years after the poet’s death. Earlier uses of the word refer to defensive “armament,” an exoskeleton. What mendicant French sculptor translated this new definition into English, shifting the skeleton from outside to in? It is only thanks to that translator that the armature is hidden from view and becomes mysterious. If creation is mysterious, surely recreation is even more so. The translator’s life binds together not one work, but two. The mystery of creation meets the impossible act of translating, a doubly improbable transfer of a text into a foreign system. The Man Between enables us better to imagine the translator who lives between works, erecting the armature that binds a creative work to another work in a different language.
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Part of the significance of Heim and his work lies in the confluence of two key cultural events of the second half of the twentieth century: the great wave of literature translated from Central European languages and the rise of literary translation within the American academy. Heim is at the center of both of these broad shifts in our collective attention, similar changes in the value we place on “minor” countries and a “secondary” literary practice. This connection is far from accidental, Harish Trivedi has argued, since the transformations of literature wrought by Central European texts were a driving force behind the deeper consideration of translation.6
As is still the norm today, Heim studied Czech only as a “second Slavic” language, as part of his doctoral work on Russian linguistics. But on travelling to Czechoslovakia in 1965, he found a culture so lively and attractive that he decided to make it his specialty, and he returned to Prague just three years later, without knowing he would land in the midst of the 1968 Soviet invasion. As Heim recalls in this book, the Soviet soldiers did not know Czech (the Latin alphabet led some to believe they were in Romania), and few Czechs knew Russian. Thanks to the structure of American Slavic studies, the young American scholar was in high demand; he traveled the city, interpreting between the soldiers and Czech people. In the end, he was featured on German television. It is a typical Heim story: an amazing performance in three languages, none of them English.
The United States experienced a rush of interest in Central and East European literature following the Prague Spring, an interest prefigured by the wave of new Czech films and a growing counter-cultural interest in the United States for works from other countries. Unlike the contemporaneous Latin American Boom, the Central European wave featured exceptional diversity in its original languages: a list of mutually unintelligible Slavic languages, as well as several other language families (in the case of Hungarian, German, Romanian, and Albanian). Heim’s competence in so many disparate languages is stunning. While there were languages he did not cover (such as Albanian, Polish, Bulgarian, and Slovene), he made do with Czech, French, German, Italian, Hungarian, Slovak, Russian, and what was then called Serbo-Croatian. It is no wonder to read in Michelle Woods’s essay that in this moment, when presses were searching for translators of East European literature, Heim appeared to Knopf as “the genius fallen from the sky.”
A leader of his generation, Heim brought a library of Central European texts into English. Perhaps best known as the translator of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, he also translated, from Czech alone, three other books by Kundera, three by Bohumil Hrabal, and more from Karel Čapek, Jan Neruda, and Josef Hiršal. Then there are the dozens of translations from other languages, including, from the Serbian, two books by Danilo Kiš, Miloš Crnjanski’s Migrations, and Aleksandar Tišma’s The Book of Blam; from the Russian, a book of Chekhov’s major plays and a selection of Chekhov’s correspondence, as well as one novel and one book of prose nonfiction by Vasily Aksyonov; from the German, plays by Bertolt Brecht, a prize-winning retranslation of Thomas Mann’s Death In Venice, a best-selling book on mathematics by Hans Magnus Enzensberger (whose math he corrected), and Günter Grass’s memoir My Century, to choose only a few titles from his
