What Can I Do When Everything's On Fire?: A Novel (68 page)

Born in Yonkers in 1922, Gregory Rabassa attended Dartmouth College and served in the OSS during the Second World War. After receiving his PhD in Spanish and Portuguese literature from Columbia University in the early 1960s, he began translating the work of Julio Cortázar. Regarded as one of the leading translators of Spanish and Portuguese literature in the world, Rabassa has translated over thirty books and has won numerous prizes, including several PEN awards, for his translations of the work of Gabriel García Márquez, Jorge Amado, and Machado de Assis. His translation of Cortázar’s
Hopscotch
received the National Book Award for Translation, and he is the recipient of the National Medal of the Arts, as well as a member of the Order of the Rio Branco, one of Brazil’s highest honors. He is the author of a memoir,
If This Be Treason: Translation and Its Dyscontents,
and a distinguished professor emeritus at Queens College. He lives with his wife in New York City.

Born in Lisbon on September 1, 1942, António Lobo Antunes grew up during the repressive years of the Salazar dictatorship. He was thirty-one when the Carnation Revolution transformed Portugal from a virtual police state into a liberal democracy, but it was the political repression that he experienced during his youth that highly influenced his adult consciousness and would inform much of his fiction.

At the urging of his father, Lobo Antunes opted as a young man to go to medical school and specialized in psychiatry. Required to serve in the army, he became a military doctor in Portugal’s doomed colonial war in Angola, and it was this experience that influenced many of his novels. After his return to Lisbon in 1973, he began working as a clinical psychiatrist before devoting himself primarily to literature.

Lobo Antunes has written eighteen novels, which have been translated into more than twenty languages. His first novel,
Memory of an Elephant
, was published in 1979. In the same year, his second novel,
South of Nowhere
, a frantic monologue by a former soldier in Angola delivered to a lonely woman he meets in a bar, was published to international acclaim. His more recent novels,
The Inquisitors’ Manual
, about life during the Salazar dictatorship, and
The Return of the Caravels
, about the breakup of Portugal’s colonial dominion in the 1970s, have both been named
New York Times
Notable Books of the Year.

Lobo Antunes is considered by many to be the greatest novelist on the Iberian peninsula. For George Steiner he is the “heir to Conrad and Faulkner.” In fact, the
Los Angeles Times Book Review
commented that Antunes writes “with the insight of Faulkner, of a man who knows the scent and taste of the dust from which his characters are begotten.”

António Lobo Antunes has received numerous literary awards, such as the Jerusalem Prize for the Freedom of the Individual in Society (2005) and the Camões Prize, the most important literary prize for the Portuguese language (2007). He lives in Lisbon.