Melancholic Alcoholic: Obituary: Michael Heim, 69, professor and award-winning translator of Kundera, Grass / UCLA Newsroom

Tuesday, October 2, 2012

Obituary: Michael Heim, 69, professor and award-winning translator of Kundera, Grass / UCLA Newsroom

By Meg Sullivan October 02, 2012

Michael Heim

Michael Henry Heim, a distinguished UCLA professor best known for his translations of Eastern European, Russian and German novelists, died Saturday, Sept. 29, at his home in Westwood of complications from melanoma. He was 69.

Heim translated Milan Kundera's best-loved novel, "The Unbearable Lightness of Being," as well as the author's "The Book of Laughter and Forgetting" from Czech. He also translated from German Gunter Grass' 1999 materpiece "My Century," a sweeping look at the 20th century published the year the author won the Nobel Prize for literature. Heim later translated "Peeling the Onion," the first of Grass' two-volume memoir.

"Professor Heim was an internationally recognized scholar whose translations from a dazzling array of Slavic and other European languages into English placed him among the foremost ranks of the profession," said Ronald Vroon, chair of the UCLA Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures. "He was a theorist, a practitioner and a cultural activist, among the finest literary translators of the last half-century, and a pioneer in the field of translation studies."

A lifelong student of languages, Heim mastered 12 of them and produced award-winning translations from eight: Russian, Czech, Serbian/Croatian, Dutch, French, German, Hungarian and Romanian.

He also insisted that he had no illusion about writing novels himself.

Up to his last waking moments at night, the intricacies of foreign languages occupied his thoughts.

"He put himself to sleep at night by learning vocabulary words in whatever language he was studying," said Priscilla Heim, his wife of 37 years.

Heim considered his selection as the translator for Gunter Grass' "My Century" the pinnacle of his career.

"It brought me utter joy," he told UCLA Today of Grass' collection of vignettes in which fictional narrators gave their perspectives on historical events. "I woke up every morning awaiting a new adventure: a new character telling a new story in a new year."

While working in a French bank as a high school student, he befriended the bank's janitor, an educated Frenchman who discussed Chinese philosophy with him, according to Priscilla.

The meeting, she said, "began a lifelong quest to understand problems of good and evil that colored forever his reading of literature."

It also led him to study Chinese at Columbia, where he also studied Spanish and Russian.

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