By Stephen Kessler

For more than a decade in the 1970s and ’80s I worked as a translator with the Chilean writer Fernando Alegría, who at the time was chairman of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Stanford. During the presidency of Salvador Allende in Chile (1970-1973) Fernando served as Allende’s cultural attaché in Washington, D.C. So in addition to being a novelist, poet, scholar, teacher and administrator, he was also a diplomat, and as I learned as I got to know him, his natural conviviality suited him for that role. (Alegría is Spanish for joy.)

I met him a few months after the military coup of Sept. 11, 1973, that overthrew the democratically elected Allende government.

Fernando was in Santiago at the time and escaped the country in the first hours of the Pinochet regime. Friends of his and other leftists caught in the dictator’s dragnet weren’t so lucky. Stories of kidnapping, torture, murder and disappearance — one of the regime’s favorite terror tactics was to throw people out of airplanes alive over the ocean — are legion.

Fernando and his friend Orlando Letelier, Allende’s ambassador to the United States, became leaders of the Chilean community in exile, and one of my jobs was to translate political essays but mostly fiction and poetry by Chilean writers, above all Fernando’s. He pretty much adopted me into his family and I spent countless hours at their sleek Midcentury Modern house next to the Stanford campus getting to know his wife, Carmen, and their four multicultural and bilingual children, who were more or less my contemporaries.

Carmen was from an aristocratic Salvadoran family and was a pre-med student at UC Berkeley in the 1940s when she met Fernando, who was getting his Ph.D.in English literature. He taught there for several years while raising their family until Stanford made him a better offer. Their casa was a lively venue for meals and parties, and for us to go over whatever we were working on. We gave readings around the Bay Area, had dinners in San Francisco, attended a conference in Mexico City, and he sent me in his place to a meeting in Havana, where I got a taste of some of Cuba’s cultural and political contradictions.

In 1976 Orlando Letelier and his secretary were assassinated by car bomb near his home in D.C. It was a tense time to be around the Alegría home, when it felt as if any ring of the doorbell could be a death squad. Fernando was never physically harmed in those years when Chile was ruled by Gen. Augusto Pinochet, who had ordered the murder of Letelier, but he was always aware of his vulnerability, and he worked with many endangered exiles and refugees — mostly writers — from Chile and other South and Central American countries ruled by right-wing dictatorships.

Working, traveling and hanging out with Fernando, witnessing his way of living a creative and committed life, I learned a lot and met a lot of interesting people.

That was a time when American universities, and the United States as a nation, even during Ronald Reagan’s ultraconservative presidency, were considered safe havens where freedom of thought and expression were guaranteed.

There was much resentment among people I met then toward U.S. interventions in Latin America, but the U.S. was also where many people found refuge from politically impossible conditions.

Fernando died more than 20 years ago, but there’s a little picture of him taped above my desk that keeps him present in my mind, and I’ve been wondering lately what he would think about the turn of events in Washington, the government’s assault on academic freedom, its contempt for the courts and its sadistic violations of human rights. If his conduct during our friendship means anything, I know he would recognize the Trump regime for what it is and proceed as he did during his years of exile, working with a diverse network of allies, writing freely and truly, and living with joy in the endangered moment.

Stephen Kessler’s translations of Fernando Alegría include “The Funhouse” (a novel) and “Changing Centuries” (selected poems).