I never had the chance to take Comp Lit 285 with Professor Heim. I remember him as an imposing presence, but always giving me a friendly, civil nod when we passed each other in the hallway. And I also remember seeing him reading while walking around campus!
After reading The Man Between: Michael Henry Heim & A Life in Translation, I discovered his activist side. And I regret it even more not having taken his graduate workshop in literary translation.
I’m not quite sure his contribution to PEN (now the PEN/Heim Translation Fund) is sufficiently well known–even if, as Esther Allen explains in her chapter, he precisely wanted to keep it unknown…
He got straight to the point. He was concerned about the paucity of literary translation into English and admired the various initiatives PEN’s Translation Committee had taken to address that situation. Accordingly, he and his wife Priscilla had decided to donate $500,000 to establish a fund at PEN to support literary translation into English. He said this in a quiet, matter-of-fact tone, with a hint of embarrassment. My mind went blank. The PEN staffers weren’t entirely sure they’d understood. He had to repeat himself.
There was, he quickly added, one stipulation: the donation was to be absolutely anonymous. He didn’t want to have to talk to anyone, ever, about having given away this money. No one was to know he and Priscilla were the donors. We all must be wondering, he continued evenly, taking in the expressions on our faces with some sympathy, how a professor in the UCLA Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and his wife were able to make such a donation. He explained: the money came from a death benefit the U.S. government had paid his mother when his father—a Hungarian-born composer who enlisted in the U.S. military during World War II—died following an accident at a military base. Heim was a toddler at the time and had little memory of his father. The family had invested the money when it came in and left it to grow in the decades since. Mike had recently turned sixty, and he and Priscilla had decided this was what they wanted to do with it.
That was how I learned that Michael Henry Heim was an activist.
