Daciana Branea: But can’t they understand spoken Romanian? Can’t Italians, for example?
Michael Heim: Can they? Maybe because Italians want to feel at home in any company. Or it’s their innate optimism. I understand why they might be able to do it more easily than others. But not even Latinity can work miracles, or erase two millennia. So I realized there was an entire area I knew nothing about. Judging by the people I was talking to, it was a fascinating world. I knew nothing about Romanian literature, but with such people . . . Another motivation was that, at that time, a colleague and I had decided to form a working group for Central European literatures and to make a list, to get a clear idea of what was translated into English from this area, what was well translated, what was poorly done and needed to be re-done, what had been done well but was no longer available. In each case, I asked two people for their opinion: someone whose native language was English, and another whose native language was the one under discussion. I had no problems finding people for any of the languages except Romanian. There was no one born in the United States who studied Romanian and Romanian literature. The Romanian person involved was wonderful—Virgil Nemoianu—but he had to do the work of two people. It’s true that there are American specialists—Daniel Chirot, Keith Hitchins, Gail Kligman, Katherine Verdery—who knew Romanian very well, but they are all social scientists.
So I hadn’t found anyone to translate from Romanian literature. This was the second reason, as I later realized. The third was that we had an excellent lecturer, from Bucharest.
Adriana Babeţi: Georgiana Gălăţeanu.
Michael Heim: Yes, Georgiana Gălăţeanu-Fărnoagă. She was in our department, and I could ask her questions. This project took several years. In the meantime, I spent a month in Italy, where I had to give a paper in Italian.
Adriana Babeţi: In Bologna?
Michael Heim: Yes, Bologna, then Padua, in the north. I was glad to learn the language, since I wanted to read a wonderful book, Magic Prague by Ripellino. He created a new genre of literature, also used by Claudio Magris. The book is called Magic Prague and subtitled romanzo saggio, novel-essay. It was a fascinating book. It includes about 150 fragments of cultural and personal history. The book may also be read as an elegy for the past. It was written in ’71-’72, the darkest period of recent Czechoslovak history. I am proud that I ended up translating it.
Dorian Branea: It would be interesting to hear how you choose the novels you translate . . .
Michael Heim: I would like to choose the novels I translate. I make suggestions, of course, but, at least recently, publishers are very concerned with finances and target profitable books. Usually, I have very little say. So whenever I propose a book, I try to use a different approach, but my approach consists in telling publishers why the book is important to a particular tradition and why the English-language public will appreciate it. Quite often, publishers will send me a novel for an evaluation, which I am glad to write—sometimes positively, sometimes the opposite. I think this is a very important side of my work, the “secret” side. The responsibility is enormous. No one has ever published a book I rejected . . . but I cannot say that all the books I recommended were published. The problem is, whenever I recommend a book myself, people think I want to translate it too, even if this is the furthest thing from my mind.
Dorian Branea: What, then, attracts you most about a book?
Michael Heim: The first thing is the language. I don’t want to say that the ideas are completely unimportant. For me, at least, it’s not the ideas in the text that count, but its literariness. What is literature, in the end? I was trained as a structuralist and I think this has given me great freedom of movement.
Dorian Branea: Do you believe that the structuralists were able, as they dreamed, to create “a science of literature”?
Michael Heim: I don’t think that’s the question. I don’t think we need a science of literature. In any case, we don’t need the word “science.” If you want to say science, just do so. The fact that I claim that what I do is “scientific” doesn’t help me at all to read a book. Probably, for those who are in the social sciences it is important to believe they are a branch of science. I don’t care. One example: Bakhtin. His theory helped me to see things in some books—especially Švejk—that I would have missed otherwise. And yet, Bakhtin cannot be applied everywhere, he is not universal. But we don’t need universal answers in literary criticism.
Dorian Branea: Vasile Popovici, in his book The Character’s World, makes a persuasive critique of the dialogical; looking at a series of Romanian and foreign novels, he decides that this term is insufficient, too restrictive, and he offers instead the trialogical, a term drawn from ancient Greek tragedy, where the epic event is viewed from three perspectives at the same time.
Michael Heim: I met Vasile Popovici yesterday, but we didn’t have a chance to speak about this. I will have to ask when I see him next. In any case, it’s true that, in literary criticism, no theory excludes—or should exclude—any other. Marxist criticism, for example, in its ideological form, is awful. Like feminist or psychoanalytic criticism. At the same time, there are many valuable things in each, as long as they don’t claim to be exclusive.
Sorin Tomuţa: Part of your academic career has been dedicated to the study of translation. You are, likewise, a well-respected translator, working from languages that most Americans would consider exotic. Is a successful translation a personal version of the original?
Michael Heim: Anyone who has tried to translate a full literary work, not just a few pages, knows that translation is interpretation. You must interpret in order for the translation to come out well. I could give thousands of examples. Yes, certainly, translation is interpretation, and you can see this best if you compare two translations of the same text. You can tell right away that there are two minds at work on the same problem, each from a different point of view. Two people never translate the same sentence the same way. This claim leads to a part of your question: how can a future translator be taught? In the first place, the translator must be a careful reader of literature, which means he should study not only the history of the literature in which he wants to specialize, but also various techniques of researching or analyzing text, explications de textes.
In my literary translation seminar, I try to bring together students with different maternal languages. I don’t work separately with those who know French or Spanish or German. If you work like that, you tend to focus on what translators call the source language, the language from which you translate. The seminar becomes a language class, rather than one on translation. For me, the target language is much more important in training a translator, the language into which you translate. This is the language that will be read, what really counts. This doesn’t mean that the other language is not important. Of course it is. But only as “a technical detail.” You have to know the language from which you translate, you have to know it well enough to know how much of it you don’t know. In my seminar, students have to bring, every week, a fragment from a literary text they have translated, fragments that we discuss together. We discuss, more exactly, the literary nuances of different English choices. It is amazing that, even though not all the students know the original language, they can find the mistakes exactly, just because the English text is unclear or makes no sense. The one doing the translating can’t see it, because he is too immersed in the source language. So it’s not a problem to work with people who don’t necessarily know the original language. Often I don’t know it, myself. This past spring, for example, students were working from Arabic and Armenian, languages foreign to me, and yet my comments and those from the other students were just as relevant as what we said about texts from French or Spanish. And this method can be used anywhere. In our university, each trimester is ten weeks long, and