Adriana Babeţi: What did you read?
Michael Heim: Novels, classics, English literature especially. But also adventure stories. Everything. I read even while I was doing my arpeggios. But I didn’t want to specialize in literature, I just wanted to read. When I went to college, I purposely did not choose to study literature. I didn’t want to ruin the pleasure of reading, to turn a pleasure into a job. It was an interesting field, but too dry.
Adriana Babeţi: Where did you study?
Michael Heim: My first four years of college were at Columbia, in New York. I stayed in New York to continue at Julliard, no other reason. At Columbia, I became interested in Asian studies. Then I moved to Harvard, where I started to study linguistics. That was interesting, but also dry. I thought I would get bored. And I was still reading as much as I could. In the end, after my master’s, I surrendered: I decided to dedicate myself to literature. In 1970, I finished my doctorate in Slavics. At Harvard, I studied with Roman Jakobson, and his wife suggested I focus on literature. She was my Czech professor.
Heim, 1974.
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Daciana Branea: You are an excellent storyteller. Did you ever think of writing, yourself?
Michael Heim: I’m often asked that question. My answer is simple: There are so many wonderful books that need to be translated, and this is what I know how to do best—I’m not being modest, just honest. As long as there are untranslated books in the world, I know that this is where my duty lies. I have some ideas I could write about if I ever started to, but I prefer to work on those books that I already know can change people’s lives. I still have some time.
Adriana Babeţi: Today, when you are more than fifty-five-years old, do you still believe in literature? Do you believe it can change anything, to repeat a well-known question?
Michael Heim: Do you mean now?
Adriana Babeţi: Yes, now. Can literature make a difference?
Michael Heim: Oh, yes, it can do a great deal. I believe literature is enormously important today. But I didn’t at the time. I just loved it. I do believe in its enormous importance, precisely because it is ignored: it is not a practical field. We could say it’s a lie. But a lie that can go far, very far: all the way to a truth. Not Truth, but a truth that we’ve forgotten. A truth somewhere beyond us, not within, but one that may become part of us if we accept the idea that outside of ourselves are worlds and people who feel in different ways.
Adriana Babeţi: Who needs literature today? Even here, in Romania, where people read a lot before ’89 (for reasons we all know), belletrist literature seems to be in retreat.
Michael Heim: It’s true, things here were different than in America. But your situation was artificial. You read a lot because you had no choice. You read the best literature from the rest of the world, just because it was so difficult to get to that world or even talk about it. It was a kind of sublimated revolt against the political order. Once other forms of action appeared, once people had a chance to make a real choice, they began to forget literature. In the West, this decline has been going on for more than a hundred years. And yet literature still exists, because there will always be a small group of people who cannot live without it, people for whom it still means something. I am bothered by the fact that, in American society, it almost seems someone is making a special effort to keep people from reading literature. It’s a kind of false democracy. We’re afraid literature is too elitist, too difficult for most people. Of course, everyone in America has heard of Shakespeare. But far fewer have heard of Goethe, Dante, Flaubert. And this is true even in the academic world. It means that people haven’t been given the chance to learn that these great writers exist. Maybe some know that Cervantes is a great Spanish writer, but they probably heard about him from a grammar exercise in Spanish, a language many of us study.
Adriana Babeţi: Is it possible to live without Don Quixote?
Michael Heim: It’s possible, of course it’s possible. But what kind of life is it? Perfectly quiet and flat. You can live without Don Quixote, especially if you don’t even know it exists. What upsets me is the fact that there are thousands and thousands of people in the United States who are deprived of Don Quixote. Or The Divine Comedy. Or The Human Comedy. They don’t know these things exist, simply put. They don’t know what literature there is to read. I have students at the university who have never read a novel.
Adriana Babeţi: How is that possible? Don’t high schools teach world literature? Or any literature?
Michael Heim: They teach what is called “English,” and which for most means spelling and very practical exercises: how to write an essay with an introduction, conclusion, etc. The teachers don’t even know about literature, because they were only born thirty or forty years ago. They don’t even know what they are missing.
Adriana Babeţi: But what about those who study literature at college?
Michael Heim: That is a very small group, as I said. Of course, there will always be such a group. Parents read literature, children see their parents read literature, or they have a professor to convert them, to send them to the libraries—the many, immense public libraries in America—and make them read novels. The number of passionate readers remains tragically small. What can we do? As a professor, I for one know what I have to do. How can I make students fall in love with literature? Instead of talking about sophisticated theories, I get them going with a simple question, such as: why did you read this book, what can a classic work say to you? What does literature mean to you? How can it change your life?
Adriana Babeţi: Did a book change yours?
Michael Heim: I’d just as soon say no particular book changed my life, but books did. What would my life be like without books? Absolutely bland and uninteresting. I can’t say this is true for everyone. Just that many, many people in the United States live flavorless lives, and they don’t even know it. Maybe they sense something is missing, but they don’t know what. They watch television, work, stay home, see a movie, most often they simply lead empty lives. Many people believe they can fill their lives by shopping. This is truly a disease for us. For some, going to the mall is the highlight of their week. I don’t believe that literature is for everyone, but it can offer everyone a more meaningful existence. Still, people don’t know this, because we didn’t tell them when they were children. The French novelist Daniel Pennac wrote a fantastic book about reading and the way literature should be taught. It’s called Comme un roman. Pennac holds that every child, every person has an almost physical need for stories. The stories that children watch on TV are colorless, repetitive, and stereotypical. Unsatisfying. All it takes is the plot of one good novel, or reading a fragment aloud, to win an entire class of children over to literature.
Heim and his granddaughter Jenny, 1995.
Adriana Babeţi: Do you have any children?
Michael Heim: I have three stepchildren, my wife’s children. Twin girls and a boy. I even have grandchildren. Seven. I am a grandfather already. We are a large, mixed family, in every sense. For example, one of the twins is married to a Chinese man who grew up in Thailand. Except for the boy, I haven’t been able to attract any of them to literature. My wife has a principle that I share: we stand alongside our children, we don’t tell them what to do.
Cornel Ungureanu: We’ve been pleasantly surprised by your calmness and serenity. Is there anything that upsets you?
Michael