Dorfman was born in Buenos Aires on May 6, 1942, the son of Adolf Dorfman, who was born in Odessa (then Russian Empire) to a well-to-do Jewish family,[2] and became a prominent Argentine professor of economics and the author of Historia de la Industria Argentina, and Fanny Zelicovich Dorfman, who was born in Kishinev of Bessarabian Jewish descent.[3][4]
Shortly after his birth, they moved to the United States, where he spent his first ten years of childhood in New York until his family was forced to relocate due to political tensions.[5] His family eventually settled in Chile in 1954.[6] He attended, and later worked as a professor at, the University of Chile, marrying Angélica Malinarich in 1966 and becoming a Chilean citizen in 1967. From 1968 to 1969, he attended graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley and then returned to Chile.
In 2020, he wrote in the Los Angeles Times: “Fifty years ago today, on the night of Sept. 4, 1970, I was dancing, along with a multitude of others, in the streets of Santiago de Chile. We were celebrating the election of Salvador Allende, the first democratically elected socialist leader in the world. President Allende’s victory had historical significance beyond Chile. Before then, political revolutions had been violent, imposed by force of arms. Allende and his left-wing coalition used peaceful means, proclaiming it unnecessary to repress one’s adversaries to achieve social justice. Radical change could happen within the confines and promises of a democracy. I have often fantasized about how different the world would be if Allende had not been overthrown, three years later, in a bloody coup. I wonder where humanity would be if his peaceful revolution had been allowed to run its course and become a template for other countries.”[7]
Literary work
Dorfman in 2007
Dorfman's work often deals with the horrors of tyranny and, in later works, the trials of exile. In an interview in BOMB Magazine, Dorfman said, "I'm constantly trying to figure out how you can be true to an experience which in fact very few people in the world would understand, such as having most of your friends disappear or be tortured, and at the same time finding a way of telling that story so other people in other places can read their own lives into that." His most famous play, Death and the Maiden, describes the encounter of a former torture victim with the man she believed tortured her; it was made into a film in 1994 by Roman Polanski starring Sigourney Weaver and Ben Kingsley. Dorfman identified "the stark, painful Chilean transition to democracy" as Death and the Maiden's central theme.[8] The play received a 20th anniversary revival in the 2011–2012 season at the Harold Pinter Theatre in London's West End, directed by Jeremy Herrin and starring Thandiwe Newton, Tom Goodman-Hill and Anthony Calf. The story was adapted in 2020 into a second English-language film, The Secrets We Keep, directed by Yuval Adler, screenplay by Adler and Ryan Covington, and starring Noomi Rapace, Joel Kinnaman and Chris Messina.
His thesis on the absurd in plays of Harold Pinter was published in Spanish as El absurdo entre cuatro paredes: el teatro de Harold Pinter(The absurd within four walls: the theater of Harold Pinter) by Editorial Universitaria, in Santiago, Chile, in 1968 (124 pages).[9] Pinter later became a personal friend as well as an influence on Dorfman's work and political thinking.[10]
A critic of Pinochet, he has written extensively about the General's extradition case for the Spanish newspaper El País and other publications, and in the book Exorcising Terror: The Incredible Unending Trial of Gen. Augusto Pinochet. Rather than distinguishing between politics and art, Dorfman believes "that one’s writing is deeply political," and, at its best, "engages the major dilemmas...of the community."[8]
Dorfman's works have been translated into more than 40 languages and performed in over 100 countries. Besides poetry, essays and novels— Hard Rain, winner of the Sudamericana Award; Widows; The Last Song of Manuel Sendero; Mascara; Konfidenz; The Nanny and the Iceberg, and Blake's Therapy—he has written short stories, including My House Is on Fire, and general nonfiction including The Empire’s Old Clothes: What the Lone Ranger, Babar, and Other Innocent Heroes Do to Our Minds. He has won various international awards, including two Kennedy Center Theater Awards. In 1996, with his son, Rodrigo, he received an award for best television drama in Britain for Prisoners in Time. His poems, collected in Last Waltz in Santiago and In Case of Fire in a Foreign Land, have been turned into a half-hour fictional film, Deadline, featuring the voices of Emma Thompson, Bono, Harold Pinter and others.
His latest works include the Lowell Thomas Award-winning travel book, Desert Memories; a collection of essays, Other Septembers, Many Americas; a novel he wrote with his youngest son, Joaquín, Burning City; Americanos: Los Pasos de Murieta; and a new volume of memoirs, Feeding on Dreams: Confessions of an Unrepentant Exile. In 2007, his musical, Dancing Shadows, opened in Seoul, Korea. This collaboration with Eric Woolfson, the principal composer for the Alan Parsons Project, won five Korean “Tony” awards. In 2011, his play "Purgatorio" has its Spanish language premiere at the Teatro Español in Madrid, starring Viggo Mortensen and Carme Elias.
Dorfman currently has several film projects in development with his sons, Rodrigo and Joaquin Dorfman, including a screen adaptation of his novel, Blake’s Therapy.
The Rabbits’ Rebellion (La rebelión de los conejos mágicos, 1986), 2001
Hard Rain (Moros en la costa, 1973), tr. George Shivers & Dorfman. Columbia (LA): Readers International, 1990
Widows (Viudas, 1981), tr. Stephen Kessler. New York: Pantheon Books, 1983 ISBN1-58322-483-1
The Last Song of Manuel Sendero, (La última canción de Manuel Sendero, 1982), tr. George R. Shivers & Dorfamn. New York: Viking, 1987 0140088962
The Empire's Old Clothes. What the Lone Ranger, Babar, the Reader's Digest, and other false friends do to our minds, Pantheon Books, New York, 1983 (2nd edition 2010) (Patos, elefantes y héroes: La infancia como subdesarrollo, 1985)
Last Waltz in Santiago and other poems of exile and disappearance (Pastel de choclo, 1986), tr. Edith Grossman & Dorfman, New York: Viking, 1988
Mascara (Máscaras, 1988), New York: Viking, 1988
My House Is On Fire, short stories, tr. George Shivers & Dorfman; New York: Viking, 1990
Some Write to the Future: Essays on Contemporary Latin American Fiction (1991)
Death and the Maiden (La muerte y la doncella, 1991), a play in three acts; London: Nick Hern Books (New York: Penguin Books, 1992).
Konfidenz (Konfidenz, 1994), New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1994
Reader, drama, Nick Hern Books, London, 1995
Heading South, Looking North: A Bilingual Journey (Rumbo al Sur, deseando el Norte, 1998), New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1999 ISBN0-14-028253-X
The Nanny and the Iceberg (La Nana y el Iceberg, 1999), New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1999
The Resistance Trilogy (Death and the Maiden, Widows, Reader), Nick Hern Books Limited, 1998
Exorcising Terror: The Incredible Unending Trial of Augusto Pinochet (Más allá del miedo: El largo adiós a Pinochet, 2002), Seven Stories Press, 2002 ISBN1-58322-542-0
Blake’s Therapy, Seven Stories Press, in New York, 2001 (Terapia)
In Case of Fire in a Foreign Land: New and Collected Poems from Two Languages (2002)
Other Septembers, Many Americas: Selected Provocations, 1980–2004 (2004) (Otros septiembres)
Manifesto for Another World: Voices from Beyond the Dark. Seven Stories Press, 2004
Desert Memories: Journeys through the Chilean North. National Geographic Books, 2004.
Feeding on Dreams: Confessions of an Unrepentant Exile (2011)
Darwin's Ghost, Seven Stories Press (2020)
The Suicide Museum, Penguin Random House (2023)
Articles
"Defending Allende", The New York Review of Books, vol. LXX, no. 14 (21 September 2023), pp.73–77. "Ever since [Salvador Allende] had won the presidency [in 1970], forces from inside and outside [Chile] had been conspiring to destroy his attempt – the first in world history – to build a socialist state through nonviolent, democratic means." (p.73.)
Salvador Guillermo Allende Gossens was a Chilean socialist politician who served as the 28th president of Chile from 1970 until his death in 1973. As a socialist committed to democracy, he has been described as the first Marxist to be elected president in a liberal democracy in Latin America.
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Death and the Maiden is a 1990 play by Chilean playwright Ariel Dorfman. The world premiere was staged at the Royal Court Theatre in London on 9 July 1991, directed by Lindsay Posner. It had one reading and one workshop production prior to its world premiere.
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On September 11, 1973, Salvador Allende, President of Chile, died by suicide from gunshot wounds during a coup d'état led by General Augusto Pinochet, commander-in-chief of the Chilean Army. After decades of suspicions that Allende might have been assassinated by the Chilean Armed Forces, a Chilean court authorized the exhumation and autopsy of Allende's remains.
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Jorge Félix Arrate Mac Niven is a Chilean lawyer, economist, writer and politician. He has been Minister of State in the governments of Chilean presidents Salvador Allende (1970–1973), Patricio Aylwin (1990–1994), and Eduardo Frei Ruiz-Tagle (1994–2000). A long-time member of the Socialist Party of Chile arrate was during much of the 1990s the leader of the eponymous Arratismo faction in the party. During the indictment and arrest of Augusto Pinochet (1998–2000) Arrate was positive to the prospect of Pinochet being judged abroad. Given that his was contrary to the government stance he was removed from his post as minister in June 1999. In 2009, he was appointed as candidate for president of Chile in representation of the political alliance Juntos Podemos Más and other leftist political movements, obtaining 6.21 percent of the total votes in the elections of that year.
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