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...