to graduate school at Harvard. Although Grandma-in-Budapest accepted my original Chinese orientation with equanimity, I can imagine how thrilled she would have been to know that I eventually learned Hungarian (“Don’t forget you are Hungarian” she kept telling me) and translated some of the finest contemporary Hungarian writers including Péter Esterházy, scion of the noble Esterházy line.
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Adriana Babeţi: If I remember correctly, the first foreign language you learned in school was French. Why?
Michael Heim: Because it was the international language, the language of a great culture. Then came German, to write to my aunt and grandmother in Vienna, who sent me a birthday present every year on behalf of my Hungarian grandparents, whom the state kept from sending anything.
Adriana Babeţi: Did they ever send anything special?
Michael Heim: Yes, more than once, and I still have some things. A leather bag, for one, and something even more unusual, a camera. It was a very complicated device for me at the time, and it came with a German manual that I couldn’t read. I was eleven or twelve, and hadn’t begun any foreign language at all. The gift irritated me. What was I supposed to do? It was the first time I encountered, as an idea in itself, a foreign language. I started to take pictures. I tried to do a lot of different things, most of which did not work because there was no one to read the manual for me. I decided to become a photographer; I even set up a darkroom. I took it very seriously. I probably could have made a career out of it. When I went to Budapest for the first time, I wondered what I would have become if I had been born there, under communism. It’s hard to say. Maybe a piano teacher, or a photographer, because those fields weren’t political.
Adriana Babeţi: You said you have your father’s gift for music.
Michael Heim: When I was eight, I took piano lessons from a magnificent teacher. Later, I went to Julliard, the famous music school. I took lessons every week: piano, flute, and clarinet. Plus theory. I played in a wind quartet.
Adriana Babeţi: And yet, you didn’t go into music or photography. Why did you choose literature?
Michael Heim: I didn’t follow through with a music career because it was clear to me that I didn’t have enough talent. Music was very demanding. Next I wanted to become an architect, because we lived in an apartment and I dreamed of buying or building a house. I loved to look at plans and architecture magazines. They fascinated me. But I couldn’t draw. So I was left with literature, which was how I spent all my time, anyway. I read and read, just like my mother. Even when I took an hour break from practicing the piano, I read.
Adriana Babeţi: What did you read?
Michael Heim: Novels, classics, English literature especially. But also adventure stories. Everything. I read even while I was doing my arpeggios. But I didn’t want to specialize in literature, I just wanted to read. When I went to college, I purposely did not choose to study literature. I didn’t want to ruin the pleasure of reading, to turn a pleasure into a job. It was an interesting field, but too dry.
Adriana Babeţi: Where did you study?
Michael Heim: My first four years of college were at Columbia, in New York. I stayed in New York to continue at Julliard, no other reason. At Columbia, I became interested in Asian studies. Then I moved to Harvard, where I started to study linguistics. That was interesting, but also dry. I thought I would get bored. And I was still reading as much as I could. In the end, after my master’s, I surrendered: I decided to dedicate myself to literature. In 1970, I finished my doctorate in Slavics. At Harvard, I studied with Roman Jakobson, and his wife suggested I focus on literature. She was my Czech professor.
Heim, 1974.
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Daciana Branea: You are an excellent storyteller. Did you ever think of writing, yourself?
Michael Heim: I’m often asked that question. My answer is simple: There are so many wonderful books that need to be translated, and this is what I know how to do best—I’m not being modest, just honest. As long as there are untranslated books in the world, I know that this is where my duty lies. I have some ideas I could write about if I ever started to, but I prefer to work on those books that I already know can change people’s lives. I still have some time.
Adriana Babeţi: Today, when you are more than fifty-five-years old, do you still believe in literature? Do you believe it can change anything, to repeat a well-known question?
Michael Heim: Do you mean now?
Adriana Babeţi: Yes, now. Can literature make a difference?
Michael Heim: Oh, yes, it can do a great deal. I believe literature is enormously important today. But I didn’t at the time. I just loved it. I do believe in its enormous importance, precisely because it is ignored: it is not a practical field. We could say it’s a lie. But a lie that can go far, very far: all the way to a truth. Not Truth, but a truth that we’ve forgotten. A truth somewhere beyond us, not within, but one that may become part of us if we accept the idea that outside of ourselves are worlds and people who feel in different ways.
Adriana Babeţi: Who needs literature today? Even here, in Romania, where people read a lot before ’89 (for reasons we all know), belletrist literature seems to be in retreat.
Michael Heim: It’s true, things here were different than in America. But your situation was artificial. You read a lot because you had no choice. You read the best literature from the rest of the world, just because it was so difficult to get to that world or even talk about it. It was a kind of sublimated revolt against the political order. Once other forms of action appeared, once people had a chance to make a real choice, they began to forget literature. In the West, this decline has been going on for more than a hundred years. And yet literature still exists, because there will always be a small group of people who cannot live without it, people for whom it still means something. I am bothered by the fact that, in American society, it almost seems someone is making a special effort to keep people from reading literature. It’s a kind of false democracy. We’re afraid literature is too elitist, too difficult for most people. Of course, everyone in America has heard of Shakespeare. But far fewer have heard of Goethe, Dante, Flaubert. And this is true even in the academic world. It means that people haven’t been given the chance to learn that these great writers exist. Maybe some know that Cervantes is a great Spanish writer, but they probably heard about him from a grammar exercise in Spanish, a language many of us study.
Adriana Babeţi: Is it possible to live without Don Quixote?
Michael Heim: It’s possible, of course it’s possible. But what kind of life is it? Perfectly quiet and flat. You can live without Don Quixote, especially if you don’t even know it exists. What upsets me is the fact that there are thousands and thousands of people in the United States who are deprived of Don Quixote. Or The Divine Comedy. Or The Human Comedy. They don’t know these things exist, simply put. They don’t know what literature there is to read. I have students at the university who have never read a novel.
Adriana Babeţi: How is that possible? Don’t high schools teach world literature? Or any literature?
