In Case of Fire in a Foreign Land By Ariel Dorfman
Translations by Edith Grossman, with the author

Duke University Press
144 pages, 6" x 9"
Paperback (ISBN: 0-8223-2987-5), $15.95
Library cloth (ISBN: 0-8223-2951-4) $45.95

Corn Cake

My old lady had nothing
to do with any of it.

They took her
because she was our mother.
She knew nothing
I mean nothing about nothing.

Think about it.
Even more than the pain
think how amazed she was.
She never even knew
there were people
like them.
in this world.

Almost two and a half years
and she hasn't come back.
They came into the kitchen
and left the kettle boiling
on the stove,
When the old man came home
he found the kettle
dry
steaming on the stove.
Her apron was gone.

Think how she must have
looked at them
for two and a half years,
how she must have . . .
think about the blindfold
coming down
over her eyes
for two and a half years
and those same men
who shouldn't be in this world
coming toward her
again.

She was my mother.
I hope she never comes back.

Reading these strangled lines, one has the sense that they were written (and perhaps hidden) right there on the scene: Chile, in the brutal years after the assassination of Salvador Allende. The poet Ariel Dorfman, Allende supporter and social activist, publishes them now, in exile.

The quoted lines are a poem in "Desaparacer," (translated as "To Miss, Be Missed, Missing.") the first section of a four-section book, and included here are many of the poems presented in the film, Speak Truth to Power: Voices from Beyond the Dark. This new collection, and first bilingual print edition of Dorfman's work, offers the sensitive reader and bibliophile a handbook of horror, interlaced as the book progresses with a poetic intelligence and a humanist grief that sings out in such lines as:

"I do not remember their names.
I was careful not to run into their eyes
or their overcoats as they shuffled up the stairs.
I timed my sorties into the outside world
like a child who has been caught
stealing cookies from a cripple
and does not want to look his mother
in the face ever again."

The second section, headed "Poems I Wasn't Going To Show Anybody," moves within the poet's own emotional and spiritual musings. Part Three, "Resaca" (Undertow) are scenes remembered in exile; and Part Four (Four Epilogues, subtitled "Anything Else Would Have Tasted Like Ashes") presents the hopeless phone calls of an exile trying to get news of home; and several poems about a heroic resistance, both in Chile and by members of the international community.

Interestingly enough, the title poem appears near the end in the guise of a missive sent to patriots still on the scene:

In Case of Fire in a Foreign Land

Maybe it's time to start praying

Carefully grab key
Make haste slowly
Evacuate
staying low

Making sure always
to keep eye on door

If unable to leave room
make every effort to notify
someone

Making sure not to shout

shouting will not help

one more thing:
if doorknob is hot
do not open door

I told you to start praying.

The facing-page presentation will give readers who are fluent in Spanish the delightful opportunity to enjoy Dorfman's own linguistic rhythms; and Edith Grossman's perceptive translations allow the beginner in Spanish, and even those with no Spanish, the chance to move back and forth across the page for an instructive experience of both languages, and a lesson in how the limitations of prosody can be over-ridden by a shared sensibility.

Dorfman, already known for a wide range of poetry, fiction, and essays in both Spanish and English, is now a professor of Literature and Lain American Studies at Duke University. This is a timely book, stark and honest, a reminder that the wolves of terrorism are not confined to an area half a world away, but are rampant and still on the prowl in our own hemisphere. Every reader, of whatever political mind, can find evidence here for the perilous varieties of both public and private heroism.

© Sandy McKinney