SOURCE: Dorfman, Ariel, and Ilan Stavans. “The Gringo's Tongue: A Conversation with Ariel Dorfman.” Michigan Quarterly Review 34, no. 3 (summer 1995): 303-12.

[In the following interview, Dorfman discusses the challenges of being a bilingual writer, the influence of his Jewish background on his work, and the role of memory, suffering, and justice in his fiction.]

Ariel Dorfman (b. 1942), responsible for, among other works, Widows, The Last Song of Manuel Sendero, Death and the Maiden, and Konfidenz, is a proud member of what could be called the “Translingual Literary Club,” also populated by Joseph Conrad, Vladimir Nabokov, Jerzy Kosinski, Shmuel Yosef Agnon, and Franz Kafka, writers who consciously, and sometimes as a result of political circumstances, switched from one language to another to shape their creative oeuvre. Their linguistic odyssey is often marked by a sense of uprootedness, of lack of belonging. They write in what one might describe as “borrowed words.” I first met Dorfman in Durham, North Carolina, at a translator's conference he organized at Duke University in October 1994, in which translators from north and south of the Rio Grande shared their notes on the craft. We began a friendly dialogue about polyglotism, memory, Judaism, and bicultural identities that continues to this day. The following interview, devoted to these issues, took place in March, 1995.

[Stavans]: Would you please map for me your transition from Spanish to English: what each of these languages means to you?

[Dorfman]: I have spent my entire life switching languages. The book I am presently starting to write, a memoir, deals with this phenomenon. It's an attempt at a self-portrait that would also be a portrait of the world I've been crossing or traversing since I was very little. I was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, but at two-and-a-half years of age I moved with my family to New York, where I had a traumatic experience. I contracted pneumonia. I entered the hospital speaking Spanish but when I came out I didn't speak a word of it. And I wouldn't do so for another ten years. So my first language was Spanish, but I erased it in relation to speaking it, although I could still understand. I understood everything my parents would say to me, but I would answer them in English. Then, for complicated reasons, when I was twelve we went back to Latin America—more specifically to Chile, where I had to relearn Spanish. Soon I became enraptured with it, until 1968, when I went to Berkeley. At that point I was entirely bilingual. I had kept on writing in English while in Chile, but I had also begun writing essays in Spanish. By then I had already produced a book or two. At Berkeley I was a research scholar, and it was there I realized that everything I was writing about in fiction concerned my Latin American experience—the experience of the marginal, of the underdeveloped. Around that time I made a commitment to myself never again to write in English—a foolish proposal no doubt.

I then returned to Chile (it was the early seventies, an explosive revolutionary time in Latin America, when Salvador Allende had just come to power) and I swore that henceforth I would write only in Spanish. As I saw it, I had readopted, or had been readopted by, the Spanish language. But the gods of the twentieth century decided to play the cards differently. I went into exile at the end of 1973 and continued to write most of my fiction in Spanish, in exile, far from Chile. I spent some years in Paris and in Holland, and in 1980 my family and I came to the United States, supposedly for a very short period. We got stranded here, and the stranding meant that I had to make a living writing in English. I had to support my kids, I had to begin a new life. As time went by, very gradually—and this is where I find myself at the moment—I began to accept the fact of my bicultural, bilingual, split life … and the split languages that I inhabit, or that inhabit me. I ceased to be at odds with my binary identity. I ceased to fight. I'm currently finishing a BBC project (a screenplay) in English, I'm working on a play in Spanish, and I have the memoir I was telling you about, which will probably be in both tongues. I'm also thinking of a novel that will have one chapter in Spanish and one in English.

Talk to me a bit more about that novel. By writing it in both languages, you must necessarily be visualizing a bilingual reader, one as fluent in them as you are. But is there such an audience out there, one big enough for the publisher to be ready to embark on a risky project like this? Or are you only writing it in that way and the alternative chapters will then be translated into the other language?

An intriguing question. I'm only writing it that way in order to express myself the way I want to. Mascara, published in 1988, is the first of my novels that I wrote in Spanish, then rewrote in English, only to then use what I had redone in English to change the Spanish version. I had an editor at Viking who would work at the English text, and then I would change the Spanish accordingly. I did that because, as you Ilan know very well, there are very few editors in Latin America: your book undergoes little change between the time you submit it and the finished text. Once again, in this new novel I will do the translation myself. It will probably be a monolingual text written by a bilingual writer. But the issue of an audience ad hoc to my needs concerns me deeply. For me the perfect audience would be one made of some forty to sixty million people as bilingual as I am. I honestly think that if I had that audience I would write in an entirely different way. I would write the way I live: switching languages, going in and out, like the Nuyoricans and Chicanos. When you come to our house, you realize that first we say things in Spanish and then switch to English; we mix everything up. But then, when I'm in the world, a world organized categorically in a Kantian fashion, a world in which languages organize societies and create wars, one must acquire or perhaps call on a different self. Although I have never written a book with a specific market in mind, I do take into account whether somebody is going to read my text or not, whether someone is going to understand it or not. By the way, in my new novel I may create a landscape in which I have an entirely bilingual country.

Henry James once tried to describe the difference between the first, original tongue, and its counterpart, the second, acquired one. He called the first the mother tongue and the second the wife or mistress tongue. It was a logical approach: James happened to be addressing someone who had English as a second tongue and he said, memorably, that English behaves like a mistress—it will be loyal to you if you take care of her, but it will betray you, be angry and offensive, if you misbehave. Taking that as a starting point, could you describe what Spanish means to you and likewise English? How do they behave toward you and you toward them? Which one would you rather have in an intimate moment? Which is the language of fury and which the language of dreams?

Gosh, I wish I knew the answer. The fact that Henry James would talk about mistresses and wives is already a very gendered approach to the issue. Personally I'm not surprised that he would put it in those terms. In my own case, I really don't know which one came first, which one is nearest to me. One is the mother tongue in the sense that it's the language my mother spoke to me when I was a baby. But I have no memories of it. The language of my childhood, the language I chose, perhaps as an act of rebellion, is English. Spanish very slowly became the language of my maturation; it also became the language of love because it's the tongue in which I fell in love with Angélica, my wife. (Coincidentally, she was an English teacher when I met her.) In a way, I think I'm married to both languages, but marriage implies divorce and separation. Perhaps I have two mothers: two origins, two beginnings. Or is it two mother-wives? This does not preclude the fact that oftentimes I feel as if I don't have a language at all—a sort of aphasia: I can stumble, lose my sense of what language I'm using, and not find a word in either tongue; I can search for the word but the word is not there. Probably the deepest side of myself inhabits that no-language geography. When I'm writing, if the voice, the inner voice, comes to me in one language, I will follow through: I let the language choose me. By the way, languages in my life have never been neutral or apolitical. They often put me in awkward positions. During the seventies and the early eighties, I would find myself enjoying English, and I felt closest to it, even when English was the language of empire, the language of aggression and oppression. In spite of the fact that the language of Shakespeare, Jane Austen, and Humphrey Bogart, a gringo tongue (even if I spoke it better than the gringos) was often understood as an enemy language, I felt closer to it. This makes me think of Rubén Darío's admonition: Vamos a rezar en inglés—we will pray in English.

Did that create guilt?

I think so, for a large part of my life. Remember that I was born into a very well-to-do family by Chilean standards, and I would try to hide that fact. I kept on saying to myself: I should be writing in Spanish, because Spanish is the language of identity, the language of community shared by millions of people with whom I'm creating a New World, I'm dreaming the Revolution, and I'm dreaming the return to Democracy. Once settled in the U.S., I told myself: You are using English to help others understand Latin America, to analyze the many contradictions of the region, to explore the vicissitudes of Latin American intellectuals. But then I began to recognize that, deep inside myself, I always felt a bit of a stranger in Spanish. I'm not embarrassed by that anymore. Nowadays I don't try to hide my social background: I am who I am, and it's because of who I am that I can write the way I write. I don't see my bilingualism as a curse anymore. I've lived outside Chile for over two decades already and am accustomed to the linguistic dilemmas we've been talking about—they aren't new for me.

Incidentally, I once talked to Oscar Hijuelos about the same topic. He isn't fully bilingual: his Spanish language is in his unconscious, in the background. He told me that the disappearance of his Spanish tongue took place at a very early age, when he entered a hospital for a few months to recover from a very serious sickness. The hospital was in New York and he soon discovered that unless he requested whatever he needed in English, the nurse practitioner wasn't going to do things his way. Just like you, he entered speaking Spanish and left speaking English. What's curious, I think, is that both of you lost, or found, a tongue in a hospital. A hospital, a sickness and a recovery—these were the ingredients.

Extraordinary. As for me, I can't remember a single thing that happened in that hospital. Not a single thing. Everything has been erased from memory.

I have in front of me the two versions of Konfidenz, Spanish and English. As you know, often when a text is translated from Spanish to English, the resulting text is smaller in size—in pages. But in your book there's only one page difference: 175 and 176, which seems to me incredible. As writers we often need to further explain, or substantially delete, segments of the text for a translation to be successful. We are addressing a different audience, with different cultural needs. But if length is any indication, you have achieved a perfect balance. Balance of syntax and grammar. Balance of content. Balance of cultures. You add and take in the same proportion.

I began to try solving the problems of exile by writing simultaneously for an audience back home and for one abroad. By doing so, I was hoping that words would become the meeting ground of what was within and without, outside and inside. The text was the in-between, a fusion, an amalgamation, signifying in one way and in the other depending on who was reading. Likewise, my characters have a tendency, though grounded in a certain reality, to become ghosts—to signify other realities. Death and the Maiden takes place in a country that could be Chile (it's probably Chile), but that can also be any place in Africa, in the Middle East, in Eastern Europe under the same circumstance. The same with Konfidenz, which makes the reader think it's about Latin America, although in fact it's about Nazis, Jews, and the resistance during World War II. I started doing this with Widows, which, although it's about the desaparecidos in Argentina, is set in Greece, and to do so I created a pseudonymous Danish author, who is supposedly the one writing the whole story. A very Latin America idea, I should add, harking back to Borges, Julio Cortázar, Alejo Carpentier, and even Pablo Neruda: we're all echoes, shadows of something original and originary, hand-me-downs, residuals, anticipations of something utopian still to appear.

Was Death and the Maiden written in Spanish?

Yes, and then I almost immediately and very feverishly translated it into English.

Spinoza wrote Ethics in Latin but thought it in Hebrew. And one could say something similar about Kafka's German, if not about Nabokov's English and French. Could you describe your Spanish to me? Soon after I left Mexico, my editors back home began to complain that the columns and stories I would send from New York were written in Spanish but thought out in English. And my Spanish today, well … it's bookish, abstract, alien, foreign, anything but regional.

Likewise with me: my Spanish is haunted by English, and vice versa. People in Latin America react toward my Spanish by saying, we don't know where you fit. Consequently, and like you, I'm drawn to bilingual writers, certainly the ones you mentioned or those that sound bilingual. I used to feel uncomfortable because I didn't belong, but now I'm happy to be loyal to my calling.

Yours, then, is a written English with a Spanish accent.

Yes. For instance, when I write for the New York Times an editor may suggest changing an adjective to make the sentence correct. But I fight with my life against it. I want to write for the gringo with a sense of familiarity. After all, I'm also a gringo. I was brought up in this country, and I know what it means and feels to be a U.S. citizen. But I also want to convey in my writing a sense of alienation, distance, discomfort. I will fight against stubborn editors to retain my own syntax, my own voice. Maybe I'm trying to be true and translated simultaneously.

Bilingual writers, writers fully active in two or more languages, might have an internalized translator. It makes it easier for editors to come directly to us, since at least one intermediary—the translator—is unneeded. You are your own translator. So in the old saying, traduttore traditore, the only one guilty here is oneself. On the other hand, translators are the closest to a perfect reader one can ever dream of having. They know the dirty tricks, the subterfuges, the many masks a writer has. A translator can bring out the best in a writer and also the worst. As I think you will agree, often a translation improves the original—the second reader, the perfect reader, elevates the text to a higher standard. But by being your own translator (and here I of course also talk of myself), we are miserably deprived of that gift. We are deprived of the dialogue one can have with one's best possible reader.

I couldn't agree with you more. It's wonderful observation. You do miss a step. One of the problems one has as a writer is that you tend to fall in love with your own language, with your own words. When you yourself translate them, I think you tend to be literal and, thus, you miss that step: in a sense, what you miss is to be betrayed. But there's a positive and a negative aspect to betrayal. On the one hand, it can be the worst possible fate for a work of art, and not capriciously did Dante place traitors at the heart of hell. I myself think loyalty is the most important of all human qualities. On the other hand, as I've experienced life, I realize that there are moments of let's call it good betrayal. Moments when you have to leave yourself, the past, and certain people behind in order to grow. You have to cross a border at a certain point and turn your back on a few things. Pure loyalty is also a loss of self. You give yourself entirely to someone else, so you may not know who you are. I don't know if I have a translator inside: the two languages inhabiting me are contiguous, as if there's a customs office between them. I go back and forth—as if I had simultaneously two faces, which I could switch on and off.

You come from a Jewish family. I wonder if there were other tongues aside from English and Spanish—French or Yiddish, perhaps. Also, I wonder if the environment in which you grew up championed polyglotism. You already told me how you would talk to your parents in English and they would respond in Spanish. …

I began thinking about all these things only recently. For instance, I have realized, while writing my memoir, that both of my parents were bilingual. That is, I knew it all along but in the past few months the fact has acquired new importance. My father was born in Russia and Russian was his first language. He stills speaks it perfectly. He's trilingual: English, Spanish, and Russian. Both he and my mother also speak a little bit of French. And my mother was brought up with Yiddish—her first language—because she was born in Romania, and at three months old she left for Buenos Aires. She still speaks some Yiddish and understands some German. Obviously my maternal grandparents spoke Yiddish, and my paternal ones spoke Russian. Thus, my two parents had the experience of acquiring a second language. All this is to say that, you're right Ilan, my childhood milieu was multilingual but, also, as I told you before, that having two languages at times felt like having a birthmark on my childhood face—an invisible, yet painful birthmark. Now I realize that it was also exhilarating.

We've been talking about translation and polyglotism, about memory, suffering and justice. Would you consider yourself, now more than before, a Jewish writer? Of course a Jewish writer is a person that is Jewish and that writes. But I would like to go further. You've discussed Kafka's influence on you and betrayal of a certain past and a certain pattern as a strategy to move onward with life. Every Jewish writer is a hybrid: a transnational, transgenerational, transcultural, and translingual entity, one that goes places but has no specific address, and has influences that come from far beyond his immediate milieu, and often his work cannot find an echo in that milieu. Considering your own present ambivalence toward Chile—when I saw you last, you told me you couldn't live in Chile any longer—I wonder how you feel about “the Jewish question.”

I have changed in this regard. For most of my life I thought I was Jewish merely by accident, that I was Latin American by choice, and that it had befallen on me to be an English-speaking person. Let me stress it once more: my identity was centrally that of Latin America, which I defined as a resistant Latin America and a revolutionary Latin America. I perceived the region as eternally hopeful, in a permanent journey toward a better future, toward a Promised Land. But as years go by, I feel I belong but that I also don't belong. No matter how much I drink of Latin America, I'm never full, I'm always missing something in my relationship toward the continent, both as I see it and as the region sees me or avoids seeing me. Consequently, already for some time I have begun defining myself as a Latin American who is everywhere and nowhere. I feel at home in many places and, to be perfectly honest, I like and feel comfortable with my wandering condition. Often I'm struck by nostalgia and sadness, by the realization that I will always be globe-trotting, that I will never call a piece of land my own. I think that's my destiny, an anticipatory and prophetic destiny in the sense that I know I'm participating in a new breed of humanity, a cross-national breed. When I begin to define myself in these abstract terms, I realize that by definition I'm as old as my ancestors—that is, I'm Jewish. If for decades I thought of Jews simply as being very much the observers of a series of religious habits and I observe none of these (my mother was brought up in a Zionist household and my father was very much an agnostic who rejected the very idea of Judaism and fought for world revolution), now I've discovered I might be Jewish in the deepest sense. After all, I'm messianic, profoundly (perhaps perversely) ethical; like a Talmudist I discover multiple readings in every text. Recently I went to the Jewish Museum in New York and was mesmerized by photos and images of the shtetl, which I felt were looking at me, not only the other way around. Some eyes in those photos were my eyes, calling to me from inside my past. So there you find me, Ilan: while I used to answer that I'd be Jewish until the day when there was no more anti-Semitism, today I'm more conscious of my background. Jewish characters have appeared in my work: in The Last Song of Manuel Sendero, for instance, David, one of the protagonists (which happens to have been the name of both my grandfathers), is an eternal wanderer; and Judaism and Nazism are at the center of Konfidenz. I must add to all this that I never experience an excessive amount of anti-Semitism in Chile, not from the Left and not even under Pinochet. Unlike dictators in Argentina like Perón and the tyrants of the Dirty War, Augusto Pinochet was not an anti-Semite.

Why was Death and the Maiden so successful in Israel?

I have heard that it is a magnificent production. But its success may also be due to its literary structure. The play is deliberately written to allow different audiences to read into it their own dilemmas, allegorically speaking. It is something of a deformed mirror, and, as you remember, a mirror appears at the very end. If the public, collectively speaking, is worried about the problems on stage (justice, evil, memory, how one tells one's own tragic story so that it's confirmed by others, and what happens if one suddenly ceases to be marginal and acquires enormous power which can be exercised against a former enemy), then it will be attracted to my characters and their questions. As you know, the play was very successful on Broadway, but it was successful in monetary and artistic terms, not in engaging the community to ask questions about itself. It had fine actors and was sold out for six months. But as with the movie adaptation directed by Roman Polanski, no one wrote an op-ed piece saying, “Here's a set of questions affecting us deeply, which we should address.” People saw it as one more play or motion picture. It was different in the cases of Israel, Belgrade, Belfast, Brazil, Kenya. Audiences were able to read their own experiences into the text. In Israel in particular, what people saw on stage was not the Latin American but the Jewish and the Israeli experience. As a people, Jews have been about as deeply hurt as one can possibly be in this world—in relation to persecution, damage, and destruction brought upon us. I believe that anybody who is Jewish has to ask himself whether to pardon those who committed atrocities against us—especially today, as anti-Semitism, ethnic violence and chauvinism rear their head again. Also, the three characters in Death and the Maiden could be Palestinian … and that was an issue I discussed with the Israeli director when the play was in rehearsal. Israel, then, probably used Chile as mirror and so did Germany, which, by the way, is where my play has been most successful—64 different productions at this point, I think. Perhaps Germans are also exploring their guilt—their multiple pasts.