We read these interviews, then, not only for what they tell us about Heim, not only to hear again the voice of an old friend. It seems utterly characteristic of Heim’s modesty that we would not rest finally on his personality, however amply it appears in the pages that follow. Following his “personal diction” leads us to ways of paying renewed attention to the texts he translated. This approach becomes all the more important when considering a polyglot translator like Heim. Where will someone be found to compare his translations to their originals in Czech, Russian, Romanian, Hungarian, German? The list goes on too long. We have to notice that, even when talking about himself, Heim helps to find ways of reading his English that will open avenues into translation.
—Sean Cotter
1 Heim’s translation of Bohumil Hrabal, Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age (New York Review Books, 2011) 7.
2 Heim’s translation of Danilo Kiš, The Encyclopedia of the Dead (Northwestern University Press, 1989) 3.
A HAPPY BABEL
Adriana Babeţi: When you arrived at Timişoara, you were sweaty, hungry, and thirsty: your train had come to a standstill on the tracks for two hours, in an open field, under a forty-degree sun. A railway strike. Yet when you stepped out of the train, your face had a smile I couldn’t understand. You explained that sitting opposite you was a young man who bore an unbelievable likeness to yourself, at age seventeen. How would you describe your seventeen-year-old self?
Michael Heim: I was a more or less typical American in that I was extremely naive: I had never been outside the U.S. and knew nothing of the world. It was 1960. I had just finished high school, a public high school in the semi-rural borough of Staten Island, a true anomaly, administratively a part of New York City, but tranquil, provincial even. Imagine, many of the residents had never been to “the city,” as they called Manhattan, which was only a thirty-minute ferry ride away. (I made the bus, ferry, and subway trip to Manhattan every Saturday to take piano and clarinet lessons at the Juilliard School of Music preparatory division.) I felt a little foreign to the place, having come there from California. We had moved because my mother remarried after my father’s early death.
Heim as a toddler.
Adriana Babeţi: Where were you born?
Michael Heim: I was born in Manhattan, as it happened. My father was a soldier, stationed in the south, in Alabama. I was supposed to be born there. But at the last moment my mother got cold feet: she was worried about the conditions in the military hospital and decided to give birth in Manhattan, where her mother was living at the time. Barely a month after I was born, however, we moved to Texas, where my father had been transferred. Then, toward the end of the war, we settled in California, in Hollywood, because my father wrote movie music.
Adriana Babeţi: Who was your father?
Michael Heim: He was, of course, a Heim, Imre (Emery in English, which is what my mother called him) Heim, but he composed under a pseudonym, Hajdu, a common Hungarian surname. My father was Hungarian. It’s possible that Hajdu was his mother’s maiden name; it’s possible he used Hajdu to highlight his Hungarian origins, Heim being of course a German—or, in my family’s case, Austrian—name. My father was born in Budapest, as were his parents. My grandfather’s name was Lajos, my grandmother’s Sárolta. Unfortunately, I know nothing definite about my paternal great-grandparents except for a hint from my grandmother that one of them was a Gypsy. Most Americans of my generation and earlier had scant knowledge of their forebears. Nor did my mother and her mother, both of whom were born in the U.S., take much interest in their ancestry. Our family lore is limited to the following: my grandmother was the last of sixteen children and the only one born in America. The rest came from Kovno in what was then the Pale of Settlement. My mother was Jewish, my father Catholic.
Heim, age 6.
Adriana Babeţi: Could you retrace your father’s footsteps and put his biography together? What do you know? What do you remember?
Michael Heim: I remember listening to what I later learned was classical music, and I remember that the first piece of music to stick in my mind was Stravinsky’s Petrushka. I couldn’t have been more than three, but when I heard it again much later I perked up immediately. Superimposed on the music is the image of my father. I have photographs and an elegant charcoal portrait, so I know I resemble him closely. So much so that one day, a friend of mine, seeing a picture of my father as a soldier, asked me how I came to be wearing a uniform, since he knew I’d never served in the army. When my grandmother in Budapest (my mother and I always referred to her as “Grandma-in-Budapest”) saw me for the first time, she cried and cried. She said it wasn’t her grandson visiting; it was her son. My father was born in Budapest in 1908 and studied piano at the Royal Conservatory with Bartók, but—on my grandmother’s insistence—also apprenticed to a master baker in Vienna. Baking was the family trade. My grandparents ran four pastry shops in Budapest.
Adriana Babeţi: What were Viennese baking schools like?
Michael Heim: Very rigorous, I imagine. But I knew nothing of Viennese or Hungarian cuisine. I didn’t eat my first palacsinta until I visited my grandmother. By the time my father left Europe, he had gained a reputation as a composer of popular music, the Irving Berlin of Budapest, my mother used to boast. One of his specialties was reworked Gypsy melodies. Once in a Budapest restaurant, the musicians learned I was Hajdu’s son and immediately struck up one of his hits. But he was also one of Hungary’s best-known film composers. A few years ago a friend brought me a videotape of a Hungarian film from the thirties scored by my father. It was very much of its time and quite good, actually. I had been told he also provided the score for the classic Czech film, Ecstasy—classic, because it purports to be the first film to show a woman in the nude, the famous Austrian beauty Hedy Lamarr, running through the woods. Given my later fascination with things Czech, I was naturally intrigued but also a bit skeptical. How could I have missed a reference to my father? But five years ago I managed to view the film and everything fell into place. It features a twenty-minute scene in which the hero visits a Gypsy tavern. Aha, I thought, so that’s why my father had been called in. The on-screen credit went to the man responsible for the rest of the score. My father would also do some ghostwriting later in Hollywood, where he was getting a new start and completely unknown.
Adriana Babeţi: When did your father go to America?
Michael Heim: In 1939, for the New York World’s Fair. As a pastry chef in the employ of Gundel, then, as now, one of the most sought-after restaurants in Budapest, one my grandparents provided pastries for. As it happened, Gundel handled the food concessions at the Hungarian pavilion and needed skilled pastry chefs. The war had broken out in Europe, and America was a safe haven, but it was very hard to get a visa. Not for my father, though. He went as a pastry chef, not a refugee.
Adriana Babeţi: Would he have left Hungary if it hadn’t been for the Fair?
Michael Heim: As I say, it would have been all but impossible. He met my mother in 1939 or 1940 through friends who recommended him as a piano teacher. She had taken piano lessons as a child, and her friends knew my father was looking for work. That’s