Dorfman, Ariel

(1942– )

   Chilean playwright, poet, novelist, essayist, cartoonist, memoirist, and professor of Latin American literature. Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, into a family of European йmigrйs—themselves survivors of Eastern European pogroms—the young Dorfman followed his family into exile in 1944 to the United States. In 1954, during the McCarthy era, the family went once again into exile, this time to Chile, where Dorfman obtained a Licenciatura in Comparative Literature from the Universidad de Chile, Santiago (1965), and became a naturalized citizen (1967). An early supporter of President Salvador Allende Gossens, Dorfman was a member of the Popular Front and advisor to the president’s chief of staff. After the 1973 coup, Dorfman went into exile in France, the Netherlands, and the United States. He returned briefly to Chile in 1983 following eased restrictions on exiles. Another attempt to return, in 1986, resulted in his detention and expulsion from the country. He has taught at the Universidad de Chile, the Sorbonne (Paris), and the University of Amsterdam. He is currently the Walter Hines Page Research Professor of Literature and Latin American Studies at Duke University, North Carolina. Dorfman’s plays include Widows, winner of a New American Plays Award from the Kennedy Center, and Reader, winner of a Roger L. Stevens Award from the Kennedy Center. Several of his works have been filmed, most notably the play Death and the Maiden, first performed to critical acclaim in England in 1991 and later directed for the screen by Roman Polanski in 1994. In 1997 he was awarded, in collaboration with his son Rodrigo, a Writer’s Guild of Great Britain Award for the short film Prisoners of Time. His latest film, Dead Line, another father-son collaboration, is based on Dorfman’s collection of poetry Last Waltz in Santiago and Other Poems of Exile and Disappearance (1988).

   Dorfman’s literary works have been translated into 27 languages. His early works, which offer a critique of U.S. popular culture, include The Emperor’s Old Clothes (1983, first published in 1980 as Reader’s nuestro que estás en la tierra) and perhaps his best-known work, How to Read Donald Duck (1984, first published in 1971), the best-selling collection of essays in Latin America in the 1970s. In addition to plays and poetry, Dorfman’s works that offer a perspective on the Chilean repression include Hard Rain (1990, first published in 1973 as Moros en la costa), Widows (1983), The Last Song of Manuel Sendero (1986), Mascara (1988), and Konfidenz (1995). In 1998 Dorfman published Heading South, Looking North: A Bilingual Journey, a work the author has described as a double memoir—that of his experiences during the Allende Gossens years and the coup and that of his life in exile.

   Haunted by memory and chance survival, Dorfman’s work grapples with the themes of justice, overcoming distances, liberation, and resistance.