Michael Henry Heim
Recipient of the 2005 Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize for Outstanding Translation from German into English
Translator Michael Henry Heim has been selected by a five-member jury as the recipient of the 2005 Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize for his exceptional translation of Thomas Mann’s Der Tod in Venedig (Death in Venice), which was published last year by Ecco/HarperCollins. The prize, which is administered by the Goethe-Institut Chicago, will be presented to Mr. Heim by the German Consul General of Chicago at an award ceremony to be held Monday, June 6, 2005, at the Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E. Washington, Chicago.
Rainer Schulte (Dallas) served as chairman of the jury, which also consisted of Renate Latimer (Atlanta), Susan Harris (Chicago), Denis Scheck (Cologne) and Krishna Winston (Middletown, CT).
The jury said that Mr. Heim „has created a sensitive and very readable new translation of Thomas Mann's Death in Venice. His ear is close to the musical flow of Mann's sentences, which he has brought to life in English through a wonderfully paced rhythm. He has carefully chosen his words that evoke lyrical resonances in the reader and provide new insights into Mann's world view.“
Michael Henry Heim is Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he has taught for more than thirty years. He translates contemporary and classical fiction and drama from the Czech, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Romanian, Russian, and Serbian/Croatian. His previous translations include Anton Chekhov’s Life and Thought: Selected Letters and Commentary (with Simon Karlinsky); The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera, Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal; My Century by Günter Grass, Helping Verbs of the Heart, by Peter Esterházy, and Encyclopedia of the Dead by Danilo Kiš. He has recently published new translations of Chekhov’s plays (Modern Library/Random House) and Mann’s Death in Venice (Ecco/HarperCollins). At UCLA he teaches a Workshop in Literary Translation and is the adviser of the Babel Study Group for Translation Studies. He has been the recipient of numerous fellowships and translation prizes and served on translation juries for the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the PEN American Center, and the Goethe-Institut. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
