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 at 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.”[9]
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.[10] 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 Thandie 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).[11] Pinter later became a personal friend as well as an influence on Dorfman's work and political thinking.[12]
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."[10]
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 socialist politician, who served as the 28th president of Chile from 1970 until his death in 1973. As a democratic socialist committed to democracy, he has been described as the first Marxist to be elected president in a liberal democracy in Latin America.
Isabel Angélica Allende Llona is a Chilean writer. Allende, whose works sometimes contain aspects of the genre magical realism, is known for novels such as The House of the Spirits and City of the Beasts, which have been commercially successful. Allende has been called "the world's most widely read Spanish-language author." In 2004, Allende was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and in 2010, she received Chile's National Literature Prize. President Barack Obama awarded her the 2014 Presidential Medal of Freedom.
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.
The 1973 Chilean coup d'état was a military overthrow of the Popular Unity government in Chile led by the democratic socialist Salvador Allende as president of Chile. Allende, who has been described as the first Marxist to be democratically elected president in a Latin American liberal democracy, faced significant social unrest, political tension with the opposition-controlled National Congress of Chile, and economic warfare ordered by United States president Richard Nixon. On 11 September 1973, a group of military officers, led by General Augusto Pinochet, seized power in a coup, ending civilian rule. In 2000, the CIA admitted its role in the 1970 kidnapping of René Schneider, who had refused to use the army to stop Allende's inauguration. 2023 declassified documents showed that Nixon, Henry Kissinger, and the United States government, which had branded Allende as a dangerous communist, were aware of the coup and its plans to overthrow Allende's democratically-elected government.
Patricio Contreras is a Chilean-Argentine television, film and stage actor.
An authoritarian military dictatorship ruled Chile for seventeen years, between 11 September 1973 and 11 March 1990. The dictatorship was established after the democratically elected socialist government of Salvador Allende was overthrown in a coup d'état backed by the United States on 11 September 1973. During this time, the country was ruled by a military junta headed by General Augusto Pinochet. The military used the breakdown of democracy and the economic crisis that took place during Allende's presidency to justify its seizure of power. The dictatorship presented its mission as a "national reconstruction". The coup was the result of multiple forces, including pressure from conservative groups, certain political parties, union strikes and other domestic unrest, as well as international factors.
Edith Marion Grossman was an American literary translator. Known for her work translating Latin American and Spanish literature to English, she translated the works of Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa, Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez, Mayra Montero, Augusto Monterroso, Jaime Manrique, Julián Ríos, Álvaro Mutis, and Miguel de Cervantes. She was a recipient of the PEN/Ralph Manheim Medal for Translation and the 2022 Thornton Wilder Prize for Translation.
Alberto Arturo Miguel Bachelet Martínez was a Chilean Brigadier General of the Chilean Air Force. He opposed the 1973 coup of General Augusto Pinochet, and was imprisoned and subject to torture for several months until his death in 1974 of heart disease while in prison. His daughter Michelle Bachelet has been twice elected President of Chile.
The Government Junta of Chile was the military junta established to rule Chile during the military dictatorship that followed the overthrow of President Salvador Allende in the 1973 Chilean coup d'état. The Government Junta was the executive and legislative branch of government until December 17, 1974, when Augusto Pinochet rose was formally declared President of Chile in late 1974. After that date, it functioned strictly as a legislative body until the return to democracy in 1990.
On September 11, 1973, Salvador Allende, President of Chile, died 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.
Pablo Neruda was a Chilean poet-diplomat and politician who won the 1971 Nobel Prize in Literature. Neruda became known as a poet when he was 13 years old and wrote in a variety of styles, including surrealist poems, historical epics, political manifestos, a prose autobiography, and passionate love poems such as the ones in his collection Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair (1924).
Chilean Americans are Americans who have full or partial origin from Chile.
Rodrigo Dorfman is a film director, producer, cinematographer, multimedia artist, film critic and commentator living in Durham, North Carolina. He has worked with P.O.V., HBO, Salma Hayek's Ventanazul and the BBC among others.
Beatriz Patricia Ximena Allende Bussi, also known as Tati Allende, was a Chilean Socialist politician, revolutionary and surgeon. She was the daughter of former president of Chile Salvador Allende and his wife, Hortensia Bussi.
Augusto José Ramón Pinochet Ugarte was a Chilean military officer and politician who served as Chile's head of state under various titles from 1973 to 1990, first as the leader of the Military Junta of Chile from 1973 to 1981, being declared President of the Republic by the junta in 1974 and becoming the de facto dictator of Chile, and from 1981 to 1990 as de jure president after a new constitution, which confirmed him in the office, was approved by a referendum in 1980. His rule remains the longest of any Chilean leader.
How to Read Donald Duck is a 1971 book-length essay by Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart that critiques Disney comics from a Marxist point of view as capitalist propaganda for American corporate and cultural imperialism. It was first published in Chile in 1971, became a bestseller throughout Latin America and is still considered a seminal work in cultural studies. It was reissued in August 2018 to a general audience in the United States, with a new introduction by Dorfman, by OR Books.
Alejandro Andrés Zambra Infantas is a Chilean poet, short story writer and novelist. He has been recognized for his talent as a young Latin American writer, chosen in 2007 as one of the "Bogotá39" and in 2010 by Granta as one of the best Spanish-language writers under the age of 35.
Santiago Files, directed by Cetywa Powell, is a feature-length documentary film about Salvador Allende's topple from Chile's unstable government and the players in his downfall: the CIA, Chile's military, and Allende himself. Malcolm McDowell narrates the film, which premiered in September 2011.
↑ "List of Supporters"(PDF). African & African American Studies Department, Duke University. Archived from the original(PDF) on April 15, 2006. Retrieved November 16, 2017.
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