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A HAPPY BABEL

MICHAEL HENRY HEIM

(selected and translated by Sean Cotter with substantial additions in English by the author)

With the support of the Soros Foundation, Pro Helvetia, and the U.S. Information Agency, Michael Heim organized a conference in Timişoara, Romania, in 1999 to promote the mutual translation of literature among the former Eastern Bloc countries. Representatives from all the countries participated. Mircea Mihăieş and Adriana Babeţi, who worked closely with him on the conference, asked if some of their colleagues could interview him during the breaks. He agreed, assuming, as he later wrote, that all that would come of it was a newspaper article. “But three of them and Adriana trailed me incessantly, badgering me with questions, one in French, another in English—French and English were the official languages of the conference—the third in German, and the fourth in Romanian. They told me they were going to translate it all into Romanian (I’m sure my Romanian needed almost as much translation as the other languages), but I didn’t really believe them. Then a few weeks after the conference was over, lo and behold they sent me the translation!”

The Romanian volume was published in 1999 as A Happy Babel (Un Babel fericit [Iaşi: Editura Polirom]). I have selected those parts of the interview that hold special biographical interest or insight into his thoughts on translation. These interviews, the most extensive Heim ever gave, provide rare insight into the formation of a translator, through Heim’s background, thoughts on translation, and mode of expression. The interviews hold more than biographical interest, however. For online publication in The Iowa Review, Heim revised my initial English versions, making his responses more concise and the narratives more dramatic. These sections are marked with a line down the left margin. Something interesting happened during these revisions, something with the potential to change the way we read not only Heim’s translations, but all translations. As he wrote in an email, “Returning to the Romanian book more than a decade later, I took it upon myself to restore my personal diction.” Of course, a personal diction is the last thing a translator is supposed to possess. A translator should emulate the style of the original, or nobly fall on his sword. In the interview here, he is restoring his own voice, but this record allows us to read his translations in a new way, paying close attention to their textual qualities. If there is a feature that marks Heim’s translations, it is his superb literary skill, through which he is able to bring the best qualities of the originals to new life in English.

We can appreciate Heim’s own storytelling style by comparing a simple translation from the Romanian interviews to his revision. Stories like his experience of the Prague Spring gain great pace and activity. My translation from the Romanian reads as follows:

In the middle of the night, the phone rang. It was my teacher who said that one of her friends had called and said there had been an invasion, and she wanted to know if I knew anything. I said no, and then I quickly turned on the radio to hear what was happening. The Czech radio was off the air, and that was a bad sign. Then I found Deutsche Welle, where they were talking about a Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. After half an hour, I saw the tanks, since I was living on Czechoslovak Army Street, and the apartment was two or three blocks from the Ministry of Defense. In the week that followed, I went back and forth across the city, interpreting between the Czechs and Russians.

Heim revises this narrative into the following:

At about four in the morning the phone rang. It was my Czech teacher. One of her friends had called to report the invasion was underway. I quickly turned on Czech radio. It had gone off the air, a bad sign. Then I switched to the German station Deutsche Welle, and suddenly things were clear. A half hour later I saw the tanks. The street where I happened to be living was Czechoslovak Army Street, and the apartment was only a few blocks from the Ministry of Defense. In the week that followed, I constantly crisscrossed the city interpreting between Czechs and the soldiers.

Details that might be understood from context are cut: we don’t need to explain that the caller “wanted to know if I knew anything” or that he turned the radio on “to hear what was happening.” The facts are obvious. These changes come at points that often appear in rough translations from Romanian: the extra “that”s in “who said that” and “that was a bad sign.” Indeed, “that” is a bad sign, and its appearance marks places to shorten sentences and thereby add drama—the point of the anecdote, after all.

No one could ever associate Heim’s work with that of idiosyncratic translators such as Ben Bellitt, Roy Campbell, or Stephen Mitchell, translators whose renderings are more predictable and easily recognizable. Yet if we read the interviews attentively, we may notice that aspects of his personal diction show up in his translations, a word here and there. For example, Heim tells about getting a haircut in Prague the day before a linguistics conference. This is his revised version:

The barber had read about the conference in the papers, and since barbers like to chew the fat as they work, I regaled him with human interest stories about the star of the conference, the structuralist Roman Jakobson, a world-renowned linguist whose biography I knew well because I had studied with him. He had fled his native Russia after the Revolution (“and a good thing too,” the barber interjected) and come to Prague (“and a good thing too”), where he helped to found the famous Prague Linguistics Circle (“didn’t know we had one”), and after Hitler’s invasion he fled to America, where he still lived (“smart guy!”).

The story stands out to me because he uses the same phrase in this passage from Hrabal’s Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age, where the speaker tells the story of an automatic pistol:

. . . my brother took it apart and we couldn’t put it back together, we were so desperate we wanted to shoot ourselves, but we couldn’t because we couldn’t put it back together, a good thing too or I wouldn’t have been able to go to church to see the ladies . . .¹

The overlap of “a good thing too” is too small to be called an intrusion of the translator’s English diction into the text. (In fact, both uses of the expression are translations from Czech, appearing in stories from different authors.) Rather, this moment directs our attention to the translation as a text, with its own English rhetoric. We notice not tics of diction, but the fact that the text is meticulously, skillfully shaped. Heim once wrote that a translation must “exploit all the resources of the target language.” How rarely do we allow a translator that much freedom. How often do we train ourselves to ignore, in particular when reading prose, the meaning created by textual characteristics of the translation.

When I read a passage, for example the opening of The Encyclopedia of the Dead by Danilo Kiš, I am drawn toward those features of the translation that emphasize their Englishness. The first story of this collection presents “Simon Magus,” a rival miracle worker in the time of Jesus, whose story has two endings: he dies either by first flying and then plummeting back to earth, or by being voluntarily buried alive. These two narrative paths begin with a description of travelers’ paths:

Seventeen years after the death and miraculous resurrection of Jesus the Nazarene, a man named Simon appeared on the dusty roads that crisscross Samaria and vanish in the desert beneath the fickle sands, a man whom his disciples called the Magus and his enemies derided as “the Borborite.” Some claimed he had come from a miserable Samarian village named Gitta, others that he was from Syria or Anatolia. It cannot be denied that he himself contributed to the confusion, answering the most innocent questions about his origins with a wave of the hand broad enough to take in both the neighboring hamlet and half the horizon.²

The paragraph uses a particular diction through a repetition of consonant sounds. The original includes a series of proper names: Simon, Samaria, Syria. Starting from this feature of the original, Heim then saturates the paragraph with “ess” sounds: dusty, sands, miserable, vanish, even Jesus. In addition to this network, the paragraph also includes a pattern of hard “kay” sounds: miraculous resurrection, fickle, contributed to the confusion, questions.

These two patterns intersect in the word “crisscross,” a word that appeared above in the revised account of Prague Spring. Yet this item from the Heimian lexicon appears in the service of the text, imbuing the translation’s musical rhetoric with crucial thematic importance. The word is a version of “Christ’s cross,” just as Simon is a version of Christ. Simon’s two fates also cross like the dusty roads of Samaria: one goes up, the other down. And Simon’s rivalry “crosses” Christ’s authority, and God, “the greatest of all tyrants,” takes revenge by killing Simon, a man killed for crossing Christ who was killed on a cross. No other word will bring so many themes together. When I read this type of find, I shake my head and smile. The entire story becomes this word. By following out the rhetorical possibilities of English, Heim has created a text that displays the complicated themes of the original story.

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.