Daciana Branea: . . . his wife.
Michael Heim: He loved her, but they had just divorced. I never saw them together. I was her student, and his. She taught Czech and was a wonderful woman. She was a true Central European—just like my mother had described—not only cultured and refined, but she had traveled widely, knew everyone. So that’s how I ended up studying Czech and learning what espresso was. With that language, it seemed a whole new world opened up in front of me. I decided to go to Prague. My professor was so interesting that I thought all Czechs would be like her. Of course, it wasn’t like that. But that was a good time to visit Czechoslovakia. I got there in ’65, when things were beginning to open up. The Soviet Union in 1962 and Czechoslovakia in 1965 were like night and day.
Daciana Branea: Is that when you met Havel?
Michael Heim: Yes, and this was how it happened. My aunt and uncle visited me that year, I was very close to them. This was the Uncle Leonard I confused for the head of the Citizens Exchange Corps. I told them I was studying Czech. As it turned out, everyone else I told this to thought it was a silly idea. Why would anyone want to learn Czech? No one had heard anything about Czechoslovakia since 1938 and Munich. But my aunt, instead of saying it was strange, said, “Oh, a good friend of mine from school is a journalist and lives there with her family.” So I had a place to stay in Czechoslovakia. That family’s children introduced me to their friends. There weren’t too many Americans around, and I was an American who spoke Czech, so people wanted to meet me. Two weeks after I got to Prague, I was taken to the premiere of one of Havel’s plays. And now I think it was one of his best works, Memorandum, a satire of bureaucratic language, but also an allegory of the entire Communist system. I hope it’s been translated into Romanian. Afterward, I was introduced to Havel as an American guest. But I have never met him again. I admire him immensely, I wrote a detailed study of Letters to Olga, I translated his address at UCLA a few years ago, and I teach his plays to my students (they work very well because they help young people understand how the regime functioned). But I can’t say we are friends.
Adriana Babeţi: How did you come to Serbo-Croatian?
Michael Heim: That happened much later.
Adriana Babeţi: So, in order, what language came after Czech? Hungarian? Why?
Michael Heim: Hungarian, but not for sentimental reasons. I said earlier that my grandparents were part of the respectable bourgeoisie—not upper, not lower—they had a few bakeries. They also had a house that my father had placed under my name. And because I was an American citizen, born in America, when they nationalized the houses, no one could touch it. And so, when I visited my grandmother in the same year, 1962, she told me about his house. She said, “You are Hungarian,” (she was a great patriot, that’s why she didn’t want to come to America), “and this is your house. You can come here whenever you want.” I went to a lawyer and asked him to send money to my grandmother. I sold the house. When she found out, she started to cry, so I went back to the lawyer. Because I was only 19, not 21, it turned out the sale had not been legal, so the house had never been sold. Later, many years after my grandmother died, I did sell it, and not understanding how business works, I lost all the money. So. Since I had to do business with Hungarians, I began to study Hungarian . . . At that time, I had already started to work as a translator. I had to stay in Hungary a few weeks to resolve some legal problems, and there I met a woman from the state literary agency—another Central European woman who matched my positive stereotype—and we talked about literature; this was my interest. She asked me who my favorite author was. I said, Chekhov. (He still is.) She gave immediately me a novel by Örkény, which I translated right way. Word for word, the title is Exhibition of Roses. I don’t know if it was translated in Romanian, but it is a superb book, really great. A TV reporter wants to film three people in the throes of death, to capture the moment when life passes into death. He finds three people about to die, and he follows them . . . step by step. The novel (actually, more of a novella, a hundred something pages) is a study of the ways art changes life. The moment something is made into art, it is no longer the same as it was before. It is an extraordinarily refined story. I tried to find someone to make a version for television. The text still feels current, not confined to the Communist period. There are some political references, but they aren’t the most important part. It’s about art—television as an art form—and art’s influence on life. I spoke once with the author, and he told me that the idea for the novella came to him in New York, while he was watching a show on a similar theme, and he re-set the story in Hungary.
Daciana Branea: How would you describe your knowledge of Hungarian?
Michael Heim: Every time I translate something from Hungarian, I have to re-learn the language. It’s hard, because Hungarian is very different from the other languages I know, and I began to learn it rather late. I was about forty.
Daciana Branea: So, you know the language more passively.
Michael Heim: Not passively, exactly. A translator must have a more than passive understanding of the language he translates. That’s why I am here. If I want to learn Romanian well enough to translate, I have to know how people talk and to be able to reproduce what I hear. I can do this in Hungarian. I could say in Hungarian everything I am saying now, without it seeming too forced, but it would take a little time to form the sentences, to get used to the language. I have to start from the beginning every time, and every time it gets easier. Still, it is the most difficult language I speak.
Adriana Babeţi: What came after Hungarian?
Michael Heim: Serbo-Croatian, and for a very simple reason: money.
Adriana Babeţi: Like Spanish?
Michael Heim: No, I didn’t make a penny from it. My university was low on money when the person who had been teaching Serbo-Croatian retired. If there had been money, the university would have hired someone else. But at about the same time, I met a Serbian film director, Vida Ognjenović—she taught with us for a semester—who commanded me, “You must learn our language.” I didn’t understand at the time why she had said, “our language.” It was, in fact, a way to avoid saying “Serbian” or “Croatian,” something people still do today. This was in 1984, and it was a problem even then. A deep-seated one, even if no one would have admitted it. Today, it is not possible to use the term “Serbo-Croatian.” We could talk about this, but it is a very delicate subject. At that time, you could still say some things, it wasn’t such a serious issue. So I decided to learn the language. Vida was a good friend of Danilo Kiš, who was looking just then for a translator for The Encyclopedia of the Dead. This was the first book I translated from Serbo-Croatian. I met the writer once in Belgrade and another time in Paris.
Adriana Babeţi: Was there anything after Serbo-Croatian? You’re scaring us already.
Michael Heim: I decided after Serbo-Croatian not to study any more languages. I promised my wife. Because studying a new language meant spending time away from home. And here I am in Timişoara! This is a little personal. I promised my wife I would put a stop to it. But in 1992, I was at a conference in Newark where I met three Romanians: Mircea Mihăieş, Ioana Ieronim, and Adriana Babeţi. I realized there was a gap in my knowledge. I knew nothing about Romania. You asked me about Polish. It would be very difficult for me to learn Polish and to use it, actively, because of Czech, because the two languages are very close. If I picked up a text in Polish—not literature, but an essay or newspaper article—I could understand it. Once when I had to do it, I could. I had to read a book quickly, and I managed. I can read Polish, but only