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

by Ariel Dorfman, Edith Grossman (Translator)

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.

Genres: Poetry

176 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2002

About the author

Vladimiro Ariel Dorfman is an Argentine-Chilean novelist, playwright, essayist, academic, and human rights activist. A citizen of the United States since 2004, he has been a professor of literature and Latin American Studies at Duke University, in Durham, North Carolina since 1985.

Reviews

[birdmaddgirl]

i immensely enjoyed this collection. the poems balance the political and personal. the author participated in the translation process, which probably helps. some of the puns seem to be lost in english, but none of the force or feeling. favorites included "mas dos mas," "correspondencia," "voces contra el poder," and "abecedario." this might be the first collection of free verse political poetry i've read that i didn't find jarring or haranguing. dorfman uses plain language to access the vocabularies of fear, grief, hope, and tenderness.

[श्रेया (Shreya)]

Brilliant

[Ebtihal Salman]

The first part "to miss, be missed, missing" is very touching, I like a lot and many of those poems I will remember. But the other parts were not as much interesting.