Ariel Dorfman delivered Dartmouth's Martin Luther King, Jr. Celebration keynote address yesterday, about whether it is a "curse or blessing" to be "absolutely, completely, and irreversibly bilingual."
Dorfman was born in Argentina, but moved to the United States as a child. His family again moved to Chile in 1954, but Dorfman returned to the United States in the early 1980s for political reasons.
As a result, Dorfman is completely bilingual in Spanish and English. Speaking to the crowd in Moore yesterday evening, Dorfman said he has sometimes felt as though he is a bigamist of language, as though each language is a jealous mistress vying for his attention.
The current professor of Latin American studies and literature at Duke University began his speech by describing how, on Sept. 12, 1986, he received a call from a journalist inquiring about his reaction to reports that his corpse had been found in a ditch in his adopted homeland, Chile.
Recalling humorist Mark Twain's famous remark, Dorfman told the journalist that, "Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated."
Light-hearted as his initial reaction was, Dorfman said he found the experience profoundly troubling.
According to Dorfman, then leader of Chile General Augusto Pinochet had ordered the deaths of a number of prominent dissidents in response to an attempted left-wing coup.
The man incorrectly identified as Dorfman was probably killed according to Pinochet's orders, he said.
When he wrote an essay in English reflecting on this experience, he began with the Mark Twain quotation.
However, when he attempted to translate the essay into Spanish, he struggled with the beginning; Dorfman said it took him longer to write the Spanish opening paragraph than it had taken to write his entire essay in English.
Finally, he abandoned the quotation from Mark Twain and crafted a new beginning which, with its emphasis on wonder and magic and sense of a parallel world, echoed renowned Spanish authors such as Cervantes, Borges and Garcia Marquez.
Dorfman used this experience as a starting point to reflect on the challenges he faces as a bilingual author.
At times, he feels like a third entity forced to meditate between two competing languages that have taken on lives on their own somewhere within him.
He described how this "doubleness" can demand a great deal of energy.
For instance, he said finds it necessary to read daily newspapers in both Spanish and English.
Likewise, whenever he decides to write a work in one language, he feels a sense of guilt, as though he has slighted the other.
Occasionally, though, Dorfman's languages decide to gang up on him and play jokes.
He related how, one evening at dinner, he wanted someone to pass the salt shaker to him, but could not remember the appropriate word in either language.
Afterwards, he imagined that the two languages had abandoned their usual rivalry to play a prank, a thought which relieved him despite his embarrassment.
Nonetheless, Dorfman values his unusual linguistic heritage.
For instance, he feels that his intimate relationship with two very different languages has made him a tolerant individual.
Likewise, he said he has found that, as he experiences events in one language, being able to describe a painful event in the other language distances him from it, and thus, assuages his own pain.
For example, Dorfman said that writing about his experiences during the overthrow of the Allende government in English has afforded such cathartic relief.
Nonetheless, while he has experienced a sense of being born in each language, Dorfman realizes that he will only die once, in only one of his languages.
He wonders which it will be.
