PRAISE FOR THE MAN BETWEEN & MICHAEL HENRY HEIM
“Michael Henry Heim was an unusual person, a scholar of many talents, a dedicated linguist, a gifted translator. With his passing, I have lost a friend. The gap he leaves will not be filled.”
—Günter Grass
“This is a wonderful and illuminating account of a wonderful and luminous writer. Heim’s impact on American letters was profound and far-reaching. [The Man Between] pays handsome tribute to the work of a uniquely adventurous translator, and shows just how much we all owe to him.”
—David Bellos
“This delightful collection provides a richly detailed portrait of the life and work of an extraordinary writer, translator, linguist, scholar, educator, benefactor, intellectual—above all, an extraordinary human being. . . . I am proud to have known this brilliant—and yet entirely unassuming and modest—polymath. Readers of The Man Between are in for a rare pleasure!”
—Marjorie Perloff
Special thanks and gratitude to Priscilla Heim for her help and support in all stages of this project, as well as supplying additional photos from the Heim family’s personal archives.
Copyright © 2014 by Open Letter Books
First edition, 2014
All rights reserved
Rights to individual pieces/translations used with permission of original copyright holders.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: Available upon request.
ISBN-13: 978-1-940953-04-5
Design by N. J. Furl
Open Letter is the University of Rochester’s nonprofit, literary translation press: Lattimore Hall 411, Box 270082, Rochester, NY 14627
CONTENTS
Sean Cotter
Michael Henry Heim
(selected and translated from the Romanian by Sean Cotter)
THE THREE ERAS OF MODERN TRANSLATION
Michael Henry Heim
(edited by Esther Allen)
BIBLIOGRAPHY
(compiled by Esther Allen)
II. COMMUNITY
THE MASTER AND HIS PETS
Dubravka Ugrešić
(translated from the Croatian by David Williams)
MY FRIEND MIKE
Henning Andersen
FROM MIKE TO MIKE
Michael Flier
BLED – PARIS – SHANGHAI – SALZBURG – OSLO: MEETINGS WITH MICHAEL
Bente Christensen
MICHAEL HENRY HEIM, A UK PERSPECTIVE
Celia Hawkesworth
TWO ESSAYS AND A POEM FOR MICHAEL HEIM
Andrei Codrescu
REMEMBERING MICHAEL HENRY HEIM
Rosanna Warren
III. IMPACT
NEW FRONTIERS FOR TRANSLATION IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY: THE GLOBE, THE MARKET, THE FIELD
Russell Scott Valentino
MICHAEL HENRY HEIM AND COLLEGIAL TRANSLATION
Andrzej Tymowski
MICHAEL HENRY HEIM: ON LITERARY TRANSLATION IN THE CLASSROOM
Maureen Freely
TRANSLATION AND ALL THAT PALAVER: MICHAEL HENRY HEIM, MILAN KUNDERA, AND BOHUMIL HRABAL
Michelle Woods
O PIONEER! MICHAEL HENRY HEIM AND THE POLITICS OF CZECH LITERATURE IN ENGLISH TRANSLATION
Alex Zucker
THE UN-X-ABLE Y-NESS OF Z-ING (Q): A LIST WITH NOTES
Sean Cotter
THE LIVES OF THE TRANSLATORS
Breon Mitchell
MICHAEL HENRY HEIM: A THEORY
Esther Allen
CONTRIBUTORS
SEAN COTTER
Michael Henry Heim translated, taught translation, and advocated for professional and academic translators. He understood translation deeply and his work encompassed translation broadly, making him a central figure for late twentieth-century literature and translation studies. Any route to understanding the contemporary position of translation in the United States must pass through his life and work. He mastered a mystifyingly large number of languages, from Czech and Russian to Croatian, Dutch, Danish, Spanish, and Hungarian. As the translator of writers such as Milan Kundera, Bohumil Hrabal, Thomas Mann, and Péter Esterházy, Heim created Central European literature in English, giving us not only the texts but also the notion that these books from disparate languages formed a whole. Heim instituted one of the first workshops in literary translation and developed a translator training method that produced not applied linguists, but writers. He advanced translator training at the same time that he improved the working conditions for translators, by arguing for the status of translation as academic scholarship, lobbying publishers to produce translations, and endowing a fund to support translation projects. It is difficult to imagine a translator’s life more dedicated or successful. 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