His translation of Kalidasa's "Kumarasambhavam," entitled "The Origin of the Young God", was selected as one of the twenty-five best books of the year by the Village Voice in 1990.
[1] Heifetz has lived and traveled extensively in India, Latin America, Europe, and Turkey, and he has translated works in several languages, including Spanish, Tamil, and Sanskrit.
Henry Saul (Hank) Heifetz was born May 20, 1935, in the Dorchester-Mattapan area of Boston, Massachusetts, a working-class Jewish neighborhood.
Henry and his older brother, Leonard, were the children of Lithuanian immigrants, Edward, a vegetable-truck driver and Dina (Heller), a homemaker.
Heifetz graduated from Boston Latin School and was the first member of his immediate family to go to college, attending Harvard University with a full scholarship.
He graduated from Harvard in 1959 (class of 1957) with a Bachelor of Arts degree, Summa cum Laude, in English and American Literature.
After graduation, Heifetz was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship and traveled to Europe where he studied and taught for three years before returning to the United States and settling in New York City in 1962.
In 1983 Heifetz received a PhD with distinction in South Asian studies, with an emphasis on Sanskrit and Tamil, from the University of California, Berkeley.
Among his numerous translations of poetry from Sanskrit and Tamil to English, his version of Kalidasa's "Kumarasambhavam," "The Origin of the Young God",[3] is considered an unparalleled accomplishment.
Geoffrey O'Brien wrote in the Village Voice, "The most exciting book of new poetry I've read in the last several years is a translation of a 1600-year-old Sanskrit epic.
Hank Heifetz has had the audacity to take on a formally elaborate, densely allusive masterpiece in which rhythm, assonance, and wordplay are crucial--and the gift to make American poetry out of it.
[6] Poet Robert Creeley wrote of "The Origin of the Young God", "This remarkable translation...holds its active authority as poetry throughout...an exceptional literary accomplishment.
George Hart's "Poets of the Tamil Anthologies: Ancient Poems of Love and War",[10] for which Heifetz was a poetic advisor, was a finalist for the National Book Award in Translation in 1980.
On the translation by Heifetz and Hart of "The Forest Book of the Ramayana of Kampan", noted scholar of Tamil, Kamil Zvelebil wrote: "A translation that conveys the sense of the Tamil original as one of the great masterpieces of world literature fills us with admiration and gratitude...(a) penetrating knowledge of the original text coupled with genuine poetic inspiration.
"[11] Heifetz has also worked on poetically revising translations from the Telugu language done by Professor Velcheru Narayana Rao, including from the Kalahastisvara Satakamu.
",[21] was described by novelist Sol Yurick as, "a stunning evocation of an American rebellion... A surreal-real drama... first-rate art and politics.
Heifetz has also written numerous articles and reviews of books and films for Cineaste (magazine), the Village Voice, The Journal of Asian Studies, Letras Libres, and other publications.
In the early 1960s, together with his colleague Norman Fruchter, Heifetz broadcast a weekly one-hour radio program of film criticism on WBAI-FM in New York.
"Diamonds in the Snow" portrays Holocaust history through the microcosm of a town in Poland, where a few Jewish girls were rescued from the Nazis by Christians who risked their own lives to save the children of strangers.
[23] (See External Links) The award-winning series has aired weekly throughout the Mexican Republic on Televisa and programs have also been broadcast on PBS in the United States.
The New York Times described "Mexico: Siglo XX" as, "...an uncensored panorama of their country in the 20th Century unlike anything ever displayed on Mexican television.