Writing South and North

Abstract

Ariel Dorfman's Heading South, Looking North: A Bilingual Journey (1998) is a translingual memoir, an account of how its author constructed a new identity in and through a new language. Born in Buenos Aires, Dorfman moved to New York when he was two and a half years old. Traumatized by a hospital stay, he rejected his native Spanish entirely in favor of English for the next ten years, until his family relocated to Santiago, Chile. Antipathy toward Yankee imperialism led the young author to vow never again to write in English. The coup against Salvador Allende, for whom Dorfman worked as an adviser, forced him into exile in the United States, where he has learned to make use of what he calls his "linguistic ambidexterity." Heading South, Looking North is the nonfictional Bildungsroman of a man who recognizes that his identity is constructed out of language and who, though desperate to be monolingual, is torn between Spanish and English selves. After completing his book in English, Dorfman, a self-proclaimed "bigamist of language," immediately translated it into Spanish as Rumbo al sur, deseando el norte (1998). Just as Dorfman himself remains suspended between English and Spanish, his text itself, a product of the dialogic imagination that refuses a single linguistic form, exists in the space between the English and Spanish versions. Beginning with the different titles (deseando means "desiring," not "looking"), Dorfman as self-translator takes liberties that he acknowledges the translators of his novels and plays into Italian and Korean would not dare. A different Dorfman is constructed by each rendition of the life. Dorfman's ambilingual attention to two different communities is apparent in the separate ways he handles cultural references in the English and Spanish editions. Examination of the English and Spanish versions of his memoir reveals what he calls "the anxiety, the richness, the madness of being double."