Michael Henry Heim translated some 32 works of literature into English from eight languages, but he considered his work a very different thing from creative writing. The translator’s skill, he said, was to plant a “paradox” in readers’ minds, so that they believed they were reading in two languages at once. “It’s a scam, if you like,” he said, “a feat of legerdemain.”
Heim studied Chinese, Russian, and Spanish at Columbia University and Slavic languages at Harvard before coming to “wide attention as a translator” in 1973 with a collection of Anton Chekhov’s letters, said The New York Times. He was best known for translating the works of Nobel Prize winner Günter Grass and Czech author Milan Kundera, including the best seller The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Heim fought to preserve that novel’s iconic title, a literal translation from the Czech that Kundera felt was “a bit hard going” for American readers. “We’re not children, I told the editor,” Heim recalled. “And so it stayed.”
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