In Case of Fire in a Foreign Land: New and Collected Poems from Two Languages

In the world of Chilean poet Ariel Dorfman, men and women can be forced to choose between leaving their country or dying for it. The living risk losing everything, but what they hold onto—love, faith, hope, truth—might change the world. It is this subversive possibility that speaks through these poems. A succession of voices—exiles, activists, separated lovers, the families of those victimized by political violence—gives an account of ruptured safety. They bear witness to the resilience of the human spirit in the face of personal and social damage in the aftermath of terror. The first bilingual edition of Dorfman’s work, In Case of Fire in a Foreign Land includes ten new poems and a new preface, and brings back into print the classic poems of the celebrated Last Waltz in Santiago. Always an eloquent voice against the ravages of inhumanity, Dorfman’s poems, like his acclaimed novels, continue to be a searing testimony of hope in the midst of despair.

Ariel Dorfman is a world-renowned author of fiction, poems, essays, and films in both Spanish and English. His books have been translated into more than thirty languages, and his plays staged in more than one hundred countries. His work has received many prizes, among them the Laurence Olivier Award for Best Play. He holds the Walter Hines Page Chair at Duke University and contributes regularly to many newspapers worldwide. Among Dorfman‘s publications are the reissue of his novel Widows (2002), Blake’s Therapy (2001), the memoir Heading South, Looking North: A Bilingual Journey (1998), and the play Death and the Maiden (1992). The poems in In Case of Fire in a Foreign Land have been read publicly by Bono, Emma Thompson, Meryl Streep, Kevin Kline, Ben Kingsley, Harold Pinter, John Malkovich, and many others, and have been transformed into films, art exhibits, and cantatas.

Edith Grossman has translated the novels of Gabriel García Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa.