of Ezra Pound, whom he called “the inventor of Chinese poetry for our time.”7 By bringing works from a host of languages into a single language, English, Heim created a textual Central Europe that otherwise existed only in the imaginations of writers separated by their languages. The idea of a cultural zone, drawing on its Austro-Hungarian connection, took shape in English translation. Long before Kundera, in “The Tragedy of Central Europe,” lamented the fact that “the West looks at Central Europe and sees only Eastern Europe,” Heim had created the body of imaginative works that enabled Kundera’s English-language readers to understand his point.8
But Heim did more for readers of this region than pave the way for this landmark essay. Heim was on the board of Cross Currents, the journal that published critical essays and original work by Kundera and many others, creating yet another version of Central Europe in English, yet another community in translation. Cross Currents brought together defining cultural figures—Czesław Miłosz, Vaclav Havel, Adam Michnik, Joseph Brodsky, Susan Sontag—from both sides of the West/East cultural divide. His work for this journal was followed by his tenure on the board of Northwestern University Press, which published many significant works from Central Europe in translation, with an important emphasis on new work after the historic events of 1989. He worked to expand yet another journal, East European Politics and Societies, to include the arts and literary culture. He was the founder of the Association for the Translation of Central European Literatures, which paired native speakers of English and Central European languages in a systematic attempt to evaluate the existing works and to initiate needed translations. This list of involvement follows a pattern: Heim worked not only on translations but also on the publishing systems in which translations moved. Far more than books, then, is the translation oeuvre of Michael Heim. He labored to create a translation culture.
Heim taught Slavic languages and literatures and authored an important Czech textbook, but his pedagogical influence extends beyond his work in a specific language. Heim was also a leader in the development of the graduate seminar in literary translation, which was structured to support training in translating any language into English. These workshops were born of the same increased interest in translation that enabled the Latin American Boom and Central European wave. Developed at the same time as, and modeled upon, the creative writing workshop, these courses began in 1964 at the University of Iowa and appeared soon after at the University of Texas (1965) the University of Arkansas (1972), and the University of Texas at Dallas (1978), reaching UCLA in the mid-1980s. As the interviews with Heim and Maureen Freely’s contribution in this volume describe in more detail, these workshops marked a fundamental change in approach to translation pedagogy: a new focus on the literary quality of English. Within the American academy, translation before this time had been the purview of either foreign-language departments (modern and classical) or linguistics. This background tended to measure the translation against the standard of the original, and the translations produced are identifiable by the original language’s imprint. The workshop setting, while concerned with the adequacy of the translation to the original, measures the language of the translation against the norms of literary English. The resulting translations are marked by this professional competence.
Heim’s involvement follows the pattern established in his Central European translations: expansion beyond the confines of his own beginnings, toward a broader community. He moved from the Czech and German to almost all the Central European languages, and from publishing his own translations to the review and advocacy of the vast field of Central European translators. Likewise, Heim extended his concern for translator training beyond his own classroom. In 2004, a group of graduate students and Heim inaugurated a national graduate-student conference on literary translation, which was subsequently held at several schools beyond UCLA. As Esther Allen’s essay demonstrates in more detail, he was a powerful force for the recognition of translation as creative scholarship within the American academy, resulting in that organization’s endorsement of translation for consideration for tenure. The most surprising project, however, was his least visible. Heim endowed a fund to defray the cost of translation through grants paid directly to translators. Administered by PEN America, the establishment was anonymous until after Heim’s death, and is now awarded annually as the PEN/Heim Translation Fund. The revelation of this endowment turns out to be absolutely in keeping with Heim’s work for the profession of translation. At every turn in his career, we see Heim expanding the range of translation, the status of translation, and the professional possibilities for literary translation, but doing so with quiet competence and humility before the great edifice of literature.
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The three sections of The Man Between follow a similar trajectory to the one we have imagined shaping Heim’s professional life, from the person, to personal portraits, to his influence on the culture. The first section, “The Man,” begins with extensive selections from a series of interviews Heim gave in 1998, in four languages, to a group of scholars in Timişoara, Romania. Revised in part by Heim, these are the most extensive autobiographical texts he ever produced, telling the story of his childhood, education, and awakening interest in Central Europe, as well as providing comments on translation and translation pedagogy. The interviews are followed by a transcription of his 2011 talk at the Center for the Art of Translation, a systematic overview of recent translation history and a reflection on current translation criticism. His bibliography, compiled by Esther Allen, extends well beyond the modest account Heim gives in the interviews, to document a record of public literary engagement far above the norm.
The pages of “Community” unite portraits of Heim by those who knew him, worked with him, and simply enjoyed his company. These include eulogies from his memorial service, attended by hundreds in 2012 in Los Angeles, as well as Andrei Codrescu’s remembrance on National Public Radio. Each essay presents a distinct perspective on Heim, including the experience of Dubravka Ugrešić, whom Heim not only translated but befriended, and translated as an expression of friendship. Michael Flier’s account gives details of Heim’s own, groundbreaking tenure case. The essays capture Heim reading while walking to his university office, collecting recycling, or celebrating events in his friends’ lives. This collection of intimate perspectives portrays the large circle of personal friends Heim developed, a community of literary souls.
The final section, “Impact,” considers the importance of Heim’s work across a range of fields. Russell Valentino describes the rise of translation within contemporary Slavic studies. Heim’s collaborator on the journal East European Politics & Societies, Andrzej Tymowski, argues for the importance of social science colleagues translating each other’s work across national boundaries. Maureen Freely documents the pedagogical techniques she learned from Heim while instituting her own literary translation workshop. Against the backdrop of Heim’s publishing career, Michelle Woods examines his nuts-and-bolts choices in two of his most famous Czech translations, from Hrabal and Kundera. A translator from Czech who first published in 1995, Alex Zucker considers the importance of Heim’s generation for contemporary Central European translators. Sean Cotter lists the vast cultural reverberations and permutations of Heim’s most famous translation choice, the title “The Unbearable Lightness of Being.” The case for translator biographies is made by Breon Mitchell, who outlines the archival resources he developed at the Lilly Library in Bloomington, Indiana, including papers from Heim. Esther Allen articulates the theory in practice that Heim’s life exemplified, in the face of a difficult academic climate, to advance translation as a transformative cultural force.
Work on this book began in 2011, a year before Heim’s passing. Completed in 2014, the work is in part a memorial, partaking in the familiar tropes of loss in translation. But we believe Heim would be the first to object to a volume centered solely on him. Such a book could be said to miss the point of a career spent helping other authors to be read and other translators to come to light. The broader aim of this book is to collect the voices of the community created by his translations: not only his friends but also those editors of literature and scholars of politics, those readers of novels and students of literary English, and those fellow translators who follow the paths Heim blazed. In doing so we advocate, with Heim, for the mysteriousness and inherent interest of the
