Dear Translators,
I oversee The PEN/Heim Translation Fund for our family trust. It is after much investigation and consideration that I am responding to your June 8, 2024 letter to PEN America, which I read with extreme concern last year. Michael Heim was my stepfather. When I met him, as sophomore in high school, he was a young UCLA professor in the Slavic language and literature department, and was dating my recently divorced mother Priscilla. Two years later I was best man at their wedding; theirs was a happy union of deep love and intellectual synergy, lasting thirty-seven years until Mike’s tragic early death from brain cancer in 2013.
In the early 2000’s, Mike and Priscilla decided to create and fund annual translation fellowships, with prizes. Mike was very deliberate and rigorous in everything he did in work and life, as is my mother. They spent the next two years emailing back and forth with everyone in academia, publishing, and the literary community worldwide. In the end they chose PEN America as the best institution, out of many, to manage this fellowship and their formidable funding. They hoped it would make lasting progress bringing the reading world together, going forward in the new century. That was the choice they made.
I appreciated your letter of alert, and thank you all for having stepped up to sign it. Language was Mike’s passion and brilliance, he was the Albert Schweitzer of translation. It is with much thought that I’ve concluded that Mike made that choice in 2004 and it must firmly stand. No one, even Priscilla or myself should subvert his choice twenty years later. Again, I have thoroughly investigated its longtime management by PEN America, and explored other options. I confidently concluded that PEN America will continue to do the job we insist on; Priscilla concurs. She sends her very best regards to you all, for all that hard work harmonizing books from one language to another, as do I.
Sincerely, Michael Kerr
Santa Monica, California
