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Michael Heim, a professor of Slavic languages and literature, has spent his life learning more th

Michael Heim, professor of Slavic languages and literatures, took up French in 1956. It fulfilled a foreign language requirement at his Staten Island high school.

Two years later, he began learning German. He studied Russian and Mandarin Chinese in college. Czech came next.

Today Heim, a native speaker of only English, knows more than a dozen languages. Language is intrinsic in his life's work, teaching and translating, and he sees in language things that others might not notice.

There is beauty in the structure. There is magic in the words. He knows it now, and he knew it 50 years ago when he first learned French.

"I still feel that magic ... that you could make sense out of what seems like arbitrary sounds. We don’t feel that with English because we grow up speaking it, but when you learn a foreign language, that's what it is," he said.

Found in translation

It's not easy to learn a language, Heim said, sitting in his Westwood home early one recent afternoon.

He'll start by studying the best grammars he can find. Then he pores over texts from different time periods and literary genres, engaging essays, novels, plays, poetry and other materials. He likes to listen to new sounds on tapes.

Heim said Hungarian and Chinese have been the hardest to learn: Chinese because of its writing system, which is not based on an alphabet, and Hungarian because it's unrelated to other European languages.

Chinese requires a different way of looking at the world, Heim said. He runs his fingers along the lines of a Chinese text, and shows how a word-for-word translation into English creates an incomprehensible jumble.

"If you try to translate literally ... you get gibberish," he said. "You really have to formulate (your thoughts) in a new way."

It takes time to develop skills, but the return on Heim's investment in language has come in many forms.

He's had the chance to see Hungary and Croatia, Holland and Italy. In May, his work will take him to China for the first time. Learning Dutch opened a rich new world of literature.

Boris Dralyuk, a graduate student in Russian language and literature who considers Heim a mentor, said his professor's curiosity about cultures shows in his teaching.

In a Russian literature course, Heim might talk about connections between Russian and French works or make allusions to Italian authors, Dralyuk said.

Susanna Lim, a student who finished a dissertation in Heim's department in March, said he encourages students to look beyond Russian to explore other Slavic cultures.

"He's consistently been an advocate for broadening our perspective," she said.

When he isn't teaching, Heim reads foreign language literature sent to him by New York and London publishers who want to know whether the books are worth printing. It was after publishers sent him numerous pieces in Dutch that he decided to learn it.

Heim also works in translation, moving always from another language into English.

He has translated texts from at least seven tongues. The title page of one version of Milan Kundera's "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" bears his name in italics: "Translated from the Czech by Michael Henry Heim."

There are people who say translation is impossible, Heim said.

"Maybe technically it's true - you can't absolutely reproduce one work of literature in another language," he said. "But you can come very close."

If two people can have a good conversation about a work, one having read the original and one the translation, then that translation is successful, Heim said.

"How many people know Hebrew and Greek? And yet we all read the Bible," he said. "How many people know Spanish enough to read 'Don Quixote'? We all read that, and we should."

More than ordering coffee

For every language Heim has studied there was first a reason to learn, he said.

His interest in Chinese philosophers like Lao Tse, who discussed whether people are born good or evil, led him to major in oriental studies in college. So he learned Chinese.

Dostoevsky and other Russian authors wrote of the same questions Heim found intriguing in medieval Chinese philosophy. So he took a second major in Russian literature and learned Russian. Czech fulfilled graduate school requirements.

Still, despite knowing initially why he wanted to learn each language, in life they have been useful in unexpected times.

When Soviet tanks rolled into Prague in the summer of 1968, Heim was in the city working on a Czech-English dictionary.

The Soviet soldiers had been sent to crush a movement in Czechoslovakia toward broader intellectual freedom within a Communist framework.

Heim remembers how the Czechs spilled into the streets, protesting and painting over signs so the Soviets wouldn’t know where to go.

"I was in a very special position because I knew both Russian and Czech," Heim said. "When we went out onto the streets to talk to the Soviet soldiers and tell them, 'No, you weren't invited in,' the Czechs couldn't do it, but I could."

One evening, with Prague under a curfew, Heim found himself far from his apartment and ducked into a hotel to get indoors.

In the lobby, he began talking to some Germans who told him they needed an extra reporter to do interviews for television news. Heim worked with them for about a week.

Learning language is more than learning to order coffee in a foreign country, Heim said. He has been to places like Greece where he doesn't speak the native tongue, but in traveling prefers "being a part of the society" over seeing sites.

Heim said knowing languages means he can understand other cultures - and his own - a little more. He adds that while he loves English, he wishes more Americans would learn new languages at a young age.

"We as a country are losing a lot on many fronts by not studying languages. ... We are less conscious of other people's mentalities and what it means not to be us," he said.

His work, in a way, is a reflection of these ideas; he said he translates to enrich his native English with what he has learned from foreign cultures.

The opening words of "The Unbearable Lightness of Being," as translated by Heim, are: "The idea of eternal return is a mysterious one, and Nietzsche has often perplexed other philosophers with it: to think that everything recurs as we once experienced it, and that the recurrence itself recurs ad infinitum! What does this mad myth signify?"

They are Kundera's words, but also, they are Heim's gift to his native language.