Where the Bird Sings Best

About the Author and Translator

Alejandro Jodorowsky is a Chilean-French filmmaker, playwright, actor, author, musician, comics writer, and spiritual guru, best known for his avant-garde films including Fando and Lis (1968), El Topo (1970) — which became a cult hit and inaugurated the “midnight movie” phenomenon—The Holy Mountain (1973), and Santa Sangre (1989). As documented in the recent film Jodorowsky’s Dune, in 1975 he began to work a colossal adaptation of Frank Herbert’s Dune—which was to star Orson Welles and Salvador Dalí and to be scored by Pink Floyd — but was never made. (A version of Dune was later filmed by David Lynch, and the creative team Jodorowsky assembled influenced a generation of science-fiction filmmakers.) Recently, after 23 years away from the screen, Jodorowsky released his autobiographical film The Dance of Reality, about growing up in a Chilean mining town. Jodorowsky himself, his first wife Valerie, and his sons Brontis, Axel, and Adan have all appeared in his films.

A circus clown and a puppeteer in his youth, Alejandro Jodorowsky left for Paris at the age of 23 to study mime with Marcel Marceau. There, he befriended the surrealists Roland Topor and Fernando Arrabal, and in 1962 these three created the “Panic Movement” a performance art collective inspired by Luis Buñuel and Antonin Artaud and named in homage to the god Pan. Jodorowsky became an adept in the art of the Tarot and a prolific author of novels, poetry, short stories, essays, works on the Tarot and “psychomagic” healing, and more than thirty successful comic books, among them the Incal, Technopriests, and Metabarons series, working with such highly regarded artists as Moebius (Jean Giraud) and Georges Bess.

Alfred MacAdam is professor of Latin American literature at Barnard College-Columbia University. He has translated works by Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa, Juan Carlos Onetti, José Donoso, and Jorge Volpi among others. He recently published an essay on the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa included in the Cambridge Companion to Autobiography.