do we allow a translator that much freedom. How often do we train ourselves to ignore, in particular when reading prose, the meaning created by textual characteristics of the translation.
When I read a passage, for example the opening of The Encyclopedia of the Dead by Danilo Kiš, I am drawn toward those features of the translation that emphasize their Englishness. The first story of this collection presents “Simon Magus,” a rival miracle worker in the time of Jesus, whose story has two endings: he dies either by first flying and then plummeting back to earth, or by being voluntarily buried alive. These two narrative paths begin with a description of travelers’ paths:
Seventeen years after the death and miraculous resurrection of Jesus the Nazarene, a man named Simon appeared on the dusty roads that crisscross Samaria and vanish in the desert beneath the fickle sands, a man whom his disciples called the Magus and his enemies derided as “the Borborite.” Some claimed he had come from a miserable Samarian village named Gitta, others that he was from Syria or Anatolia. It cannot be denied that he himself contributed to the confusion, answering the most innocent questions about his origins with a wave of the hand broad enough to take in both the neighboring hamlet and half the horizon.2
The paragraph uses a particular diction through a repetition of consonant sounds. The original includes a series of proper names: Simon, Samaria, Syria. Starting from this feature of the original, Heim then saturates the paragraph with “ess” sounds: dusty, sands, miserable, vanish, even Jesus. In addition to this network, the paragraph also includes a pattern of hard “kay” sounds: miraculous resurrection, fickle, contributed to the confusion, questions.
These two patterns intersect in the word “crisscross,” a word that appeared above in the revised account of Prague Spring. Yet this item from the Heimian lexicon appears in the service of the text, imbuing the translation’s musical rhetoric with crucial thematic importance. The word is a version of “Christ’s cross,” just as Simon is a version of Christ. Simon’s two fates also cross like the dusty roads of Samaria: one goes up, the other down. And Simon’s rivalry “crosses” Christ’s authority, and God, “the greatest of all tyrants,” takes revenge by killing Simon, a man killed for crossing Christ who was killed on a cross. No other word will bring so many themes together. When I read this type of find, I shake my head and smile. The entire story becomes this word. By following out the rhetorical possibilities of English, Heim has created a text that displays the complicated themes of the original story.
We read these interviews, then, not only for what they tell us about Heim, not only to hear again the voice of an old friend. It seems utterly characteristic of Heim’s modesty that we would not rest finally on his personality, however amply it appears in the pages that follow. Following his “personal diction” leads us to ways of paying renewed attention to the texts he translated. This approach becomes all the more important when considering a polyglot translator like Heim. Where will someone be found to compare his translations to their originals in Czech, Russian, Romanian, Hungarian, German? The list goes on too long. We have to notice that, even when talking about himself, Heim helps to find ways of reading his English that will open avenues into translation.
—Sean Cotter
1 Heim’s translation of Bohumil Hrabal, Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age (New York Review Books, 2011) 7.
2 Heim’s translation of Danilo Kiš, The Encyclopedia of the Dead (Northwestern University Press, 1989) 3.
A HAPPY BABEL
Adriana Babeţi: When you arrived at Timişoara, you were sweaty, hungry, and thirsty: your train had come to a standstill on the tracks for two hours, in an open field, under a forty-degree sun. A railway strike. Yet when you stepped out of the train, your face had a smile I couldn’t understand. You explained that sitting opposite you was a young man who bore an unbelievable likeness to yourself, at age seventeen. How would you describe your seventeen-year-old self?
Michael Heim: I was a more or less typical American in that I was extremely naive: I had never been outside the U.S. and knew nothing of the world. It was 1960. I had just finished high school, a public high school in the semi-rural borough of Staten Island, a true anomaly, administratively a part of New York City, but tranquil, provincial even. Imagine, many of the residents had never been to “the city,” as they called Manhattan, which was only a thirty-minute ferry ride away. (I made the bus, ferry, and subway trip to Manhattan every Saturday to take piano and clarinet lessons at the Juilliard School of Music preparatory division.) I felt a little foreign to the place, having come there from California. We had moved because my mother remarried after my father’s early death.
Heim as a toddler.
Adriana Babeţi: Where were you born?
Michael Heim: I was born in Manhattan, as it happened. My father was a soldier, stationed in the south, in Alabama. I was supposed to be born there. But at the last moment my mother got cold feet: she was worried about the conditions in the military hospital and decided to give birth in Manhattan, where her mother was living at the time. Barely a month after I was born, however, we moved to Texas, where my father had been transferred. Then, toward the end of the war, we settled in California, in Hollywood, because my father wrote movie music.
Adriana Babeţi: Who was your father?
Michael Heim: He was, of course, a Heim, Imre (Emery in English, which is what my mother called him) Heim, but he composed under a pseudonym, Hajdu, a common Hungarian surname. My father was Hungarian. It’s possible that Hajdu was his mother’s maiden name; it’s possible he used Hajdu to highlight his Hungarian origins, Heim being of course a German—or, in my family’s case, Austrian—name. My father was born in Budapest, as were his parents. My grandfather’s name was Lajos, my grandmother’s Sárolta. Unfortunately, I know nothing definite about my paternal great-grandparents except for a hint from my grandmother that one of them was a Gypsy. Most Americans of my generation and earlier had scant knowledge of their forebears. Nor did my mother and her mother, both of whom were born in the U.S., take much interest in their ancestry. Our family lore is limited to the following: my grandmother was the last of sixteen children and the only one born in America. The rest came from Kovno in what was then the Pale of Settlement. My mother was Jewish, my father Catholic.
Heim, age 6.
Adriana Babeţi: Could you retrace your father’s footsteps and put his biography together? What do you know? What do you remember?
Michael Heim: I remember listening to what I later learned was classical music, and I remember that the first piece of music to stick in my mind was Stravinsky’s Petrushka. I couldn’t have been more than three, but when I heard it again much later I perked up immediately. Superimposed on the music is the image of my father. I have photographs and an elegant charcoal portrait, so I know I resemble him closely. So much so that one day, a friend of mine, seeing a picture of my father as a soldier, asked me how I came to be wearing a uniform, since he knew I’d never served in the army. When my grandmother in Budapest (my mother and I always referred to her as “Grandma-in-Budapest”) saw me for the first time, she cried and cried. She said it wasn’t her grandson visiting; it was her son. My father was born in Budapest in 1908 and studied piano at the Royal Conservatory with Bartók, but—on my grandmother’s insistence—also apprenticed to a master baker
