Death and the writer

Heading South, Looking North: A Bilingual Journey by Ariel Dorfman Hodder & Stoughton 282pp, £17.99 in UK

Heading South, Looking North: A Bilingual Journey by Ariel Dorfman Hodder & Stoughton 282pp, £17.99 in UK

THE Chilean writer Ariel Dorfman is best known internationally as the author of Death and the Maiden, his acclaimed play about political torture. But he is also the co-author of a slim volume entitled How to Read Donald Duck, a witty, anti-imperialist polemic which was one of the most characteristic cultural products of the short-lived regime of President Salvador Allende.

Throughout his life Dorfman has moved between Spanish and English, between North American culture and South American identity. He has learnt from experience as much as from Marxist dogma. He concludes an emotional paragraph on Spanish as the language of conquest (whose sentiments will be all too familiar to Irish-speakers) with the calm observation that "Languages do not only expand through conquest: they also grow by offering a safe haven to those who come to them in danger."

He was born Vladimiro Ariel Dorfman in Buenos Aires in 1942. Both his parents were immigrants from Eastern Europe. His paternal grandmother was Trotsky's interpreter at Brest Litovsk. Even though his father, Adolfo, was only three years old when he left Russia, he remained fluent in Russian all his life, as well as in English and Spanish.

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Adolfo Dorfman was a brilliant student, but because of his leftwing views he was forced to flee Argentina following a Fascist coup in 1943. He took up an already granted Guggenheim scholarship, an ironic situation, as the author points out: "My anti-imperialist father fled . . . to the United States, the most powerful capitalist country in the world, protected by a foundation built with money that had come out of one of the world's largest consortiums."

Dorfman tells his story in chapters that alternate between his education as a diplomat's son in New York and later at an English-style prep school in Chile, and the fraught, chaotic days after the military coup that ended Allende's presidency.

Central to his narrative is the place in his life of his two languages, English and Spanish. His memoir is remarkable for its acute awareness of what these languages have meant to him. As a child in New York he rejected Spanish entirely, and when he returned to Chile as a teenager he could barely get by in his native tongue. He resolved with a passion to write only in English, a resolution whose absurdity was only revealed to him on his return to the United States in 1968 as a postgraduate student. He made an equally strong resolution to speak and write only in Spanish, which lasted until he became what he calls "a bigamist of language", and used his English to help him gain release from the Argentinian Embassy where he had been interned awaiting a safe-conduct passage out of Chile.

Dorfman's life is unusually rich in irony and paradox. Only because he grew up in New York, immersed in North American culture, was he able to co-write (with sociologist Armand Mattelart) the Donald Duck book that established his credentials as a Chilean intellectual. And it was the same book, which had identified him so closely with Chile, that would ultimately be the chief cause of his exile. Only days after the coup, Dorfman is in hiding, watching his book, which was vehemently hated by the right wing, being burnt by Chilean soldiers on television. He looks at his host, and they both think: "If they are doing this to the book, what will they do to the hands that wrote the book, and what are they doing right now to the eyes all over Chile that read that book . . ."

Like all the best memoirs, this is history brought vividly to life.

Alannah Hopkin is a writer and critic