Michael Heim: Yes, most of our professors were Russian. But he had left Russia during the Revolution, when he was eleven or twelve, and grown up in Germany, so he was more German than Russian. I translated his history of Russian literature from German into English. About my dissertation, he said to me, “It’s an interesting subject that I know nothing about. See what you can do. You have two years.” I did what I could.
One day while I was working, I answered the phone and heard a man’s voice: “Mike?” Who could it be? I thought it was my uncle. So I answered, “Hi, Uncle Leonard!” “I’m not your uncle,” the voice said indignantly. “Then why did you call me Mike?” I asked, also annoyed. The conversation continued anyway. The man wanted me to go to the Soviet Union, East Berlin, and Prague as the interpreter for a group of American sound engineers. Three weeks. I wouldn’t make any money, but I wouldn’t have to pay for anything while I was there. I said no, since I was busy with my dissertation. Then I thought I could speed up my research before leaving and be okay missing three weeks. It turned out that the man was the head of an organization named, strangely, the Citizen Exchange Corps, a group that arranged trips to the Soviet Union and meetings with local people. It was very political. Typical 1970s. What was the big danger? Nuclear war. This group thought that if enough Americans came to know enough Russians, no one would ever launch a bomb. At the organization’s office, a few hours before departure, I saw a rare object: the second half of the Leningrad phone book. For years and years, it had been impossible to find a phone book for any Soviet city.
Daciana Branea: Why just the second half?
Michael Heim: I don’t know, but I needed letter Ю), the second to last letter in the Cyrillic alphabet. Because the best scholar of Russian translation history lived in Leningrad, a man named Etkind. So I wrote his number down, and the first thing I did when I reached Leningrad was to prepare what I had to say, in the best Russian I could—since I didn’t want my accent to reveal that I was a foreigner. I called, he answered, I said what I had to say, as clearly and practically as I could: who I was and what I wanted. He invited me to his house right away, we talked for three hours. I explained what I had done up to then, he showed me what was and wasn’t good in my work and recommended a bibliography. These were the three most important hours in my academic life. I returned to the Soviet Union in 1980 and 1981, for three or four weeks. In 1984, I took 60 American students. It was awful. On the first day, one of the students came to me and said, “I have to tell you something very important. Everyone in my family has died of cancer, and I think I have it, too.” He was very upset, he had never travelled abroad, or anywhere, and he was sure he had to see an American doctor. I took him to the embassy and he came back with an aspirin. He was perfectly healthy.
Adriana Babeţi: And how did you come to Central Europe?
Michael Heim: As I’ve already said, when I finished college—this was 1964—I decided to study linguistics; I had studied Russian, Chinese, German, and French. I also spoke Spanish, because I had worked as a guide while in college, to make a little money, and there were many tourists from Latin America. They needed people to accompany the tourist groups, so I had a good reason to learn the language quickly and speak it fluently.
Daciana Branea: How quickly can you learn a foreign language?
Michael Heim: Spanish was not too hard; you’ll remember what they used to say about Spanish. We looked down on it. As you know, Spanish has many dialects. Foreigners learn a standard version that, in fact, does not exist. You had to speak the same language with people from Cuba or Puerto Rico, and you didn’t understand one iota of what they said. They understood us but could not understand why we didn’t understand them. But Spanish became important for another reason: my Hispanic Literature professor would become the most important translator of Latin American literature.
Daciana Branea: Who?
Michael Heim: His name is Gregory Rabassa. He translated One Hundred Years of Solitude, all of García Márquez’s novels. He translated Jorge Amado, and another six great writers who . . .
Daciana Branea: Who translated Borges?
Michael Heim: Not him. The American translations of Borges are very problematic. All of his work has been translated, of course, except for the essays, which a friend of mine is working on at this moment. But Borges, who chose his own translators (and spoke perfect English), didn’t start off with the right people and let himself be led astray by under-prepared translators. One of them—an impostor—called on Borges once, just so he could later claim they were friends.
Daciana Branea: How have American perceptions of foreign languages changed over time?
Michael Heim: Not at all. Or yes, actually, now we think no one needs any foreign languages . . .
Daciana Branea: Except English.
Michael Heim: Americans think everyone in the world should know English. In California, if you want to talk with the housekeeper or gardener, maybe you should know five words in Spanish. No more than five. You can buy special dictionaries: Housekeeper Spanish, Gardener Spanish.
Daciana Branea: Is this politically correct?
Michael Heim: No, but neither are the people who make them.
Adriana Babeţi: And still: Central Europe?
Michael Heim: I began to study linguistics in graduate school because I had learned such different languages, and I liked theory. The same thing happened with music: I was a musician, I liked to play the piano and to study music theory. But after the first week of my linguistics career, I realized I had made a mistake. In the second week, you could still drop a course and add a different one. When people ask why I went to the Slavics department, I laugh and tell them, because it was on the third floor. The French department was on the second. French was—and still is—the foreign language I speak best. I asked for information about their program, but they didn’t give me a second glance, because they already had too many students. The library was on the first floor, Slavic languages the third, and the fourth was German.
Adriana Babeţi: But you never made it to the fourth.
Michael Heim: No, because the secretary on the third was very . . .
Adriana Babeţi: Reserved?
Michael Heim: Worse, blasé. She said something like, “If you’re good enough for us, we’ll know.” So I ended up there. I had majored in Russian, at least on paper, and even if Oriental Studies had been my real specialty, I had worked a lot on Russian. But, back to Central Europe. In the Slavics department you studied Russian literature plus an East European one. If you specialized in linguistics, you studied Russian and two other languages. Russian is an Eastern Slavic language, and the other two had to be Western Slavic (Polish or Czech) and Southern Slavic (Bulgarian or Serbo-Croatian).
Daciana Branea: Did this seem like a more comfortable choice than literature?
Michael Heim: As I’ve said, I didn’t want to study literature because I liked it too much. The same reason I didn’t study music. I thought literature meant so much to me that it would be a mistake to approach it professionally. Work is one thing, affinity another.
Daciana Branea: Maybe we should change our specialties, too . . .
Michael Heim: You shouldn’t make something you like into your job, or so I thought. I studied Slavic linguistics, which was completely different from general linguistics. I could do a little literature, too. I chose Czech. Why? Two reasons. I had heard the Czech professor was very good—when I tell you who it was, you’ll understand. Then, I remembered something my mother had told me about Czechs. When my father was a Hollywood composer, there was a kind of Central European