A Tribute to Michael Henry Heim
We’ve just learned that translator Michael Henry Heim died over the weekend. Go to Susan Bernofsky’s Translationista blog to read a fuller obituary, with more to follow, but our tribute is a sample of his translation from Czech to English of Bohumil Hrabal’s Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age, not an easy book to excerpt since it is all one long sentence, which goes to show how hard it must have been to translate. We’ll start at the beginning:
Just like I come here to see you, young ladies, I used to go to church to see my beauties, well, not exactly to church, I’m not much of a churchgoer, but to a small shop next to the parish house, a tiny place, where a man by the name of Altman sold secondhand sewing machines, dual-spring Victrolas from America, and Minimax fire extinguishers, and this Altman he had a sideline delivering beauties to pubs and bars all over the district, and the young ladies would sleep in Altman’s back room, or when summer came they set up tents in the garden and the dean of the church would take his constitutional along the fence and those show-offs would put a Victrola out there and sing and smoke and tan themselves in their bathing suits…
