Gregory Rabassa (born 9 March 1922) is a renowned literary translator from Spanish and Portuguese to English who currently teaches at Queens College where he is a Distinguished Professor. Rabassa received a bachelor's degree from Dartmouth; he enrolled as a graduate student at Columbia University, where he earned a doctorate. He taught for over two decades at Columbia University before accepting a position at Queens College. Typically, Rabassa translates without reading the book beforehand, working as he goes. Rabassa had a particularly close and productive working relation with Cort�zar. For his version of Cort�zar's novel, Hopscotch, Rabassa received a National Book Award for… Translation. In 2006, he was awarded the National Medal of Arts. He has written a memoir detailing his experiences as a translator, If This Be Treason: Translation and Its Dyscontents, A Memoir.
Gabriel Garc�a M�rquez was born in Aracataca, Colombia on March 6, 1927. After studying law and journalism at the National University of Colombia in Bogota, he became a journalist. In 1965, he left journalism, to devote himself to writing. His works included Leaf Storm, No One Writes to the Colonel, The Evil Hour, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Love in the Time of Cholera, The Autumn of the Patriarch, Chronicle of a Death Foretold, The General in His Labyrinth, Clandestine in Chile, and the memoir Living to Tell the Tale. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982. He died on April 17, 2014 at the age of 87.