you yourself were only an uncertain vision of pitiful eyes through the dusty peepholes of the window of a train, only the tremor of some taciturn lips, the fugitive wave of a velvet glove on the no man's hand of an old man with no destiny with our never knowing who he was, or what he was like, or even if he was only a figment of the imagination, a comic tyrant who never knew where the reverse side was and where the right of this life which we loved with an insatiable passion that you never dared even to imagine out of the fear of knowing what we knew only too well that it was arduous and ephemeral but there wasn't any other, general, because we knew who we were while he was left never knowing it forever with the soft whistle of his rupture of a dead old man cut off at the roots by the slash of death, flying through the dark sound of the last frozen leaves of his autumn toward the homeland of shadows of the truth of oblivion, clinging to his fear of the rotting cloth of death's hooded cassock and alien to the clamor of the frantic crowds who took to the streets singing hymns of joy at the jubilant news of his death and alien forevermore to the music of liberation and the rockets of jubilation and the bells of glory that announced to the world the good news that the uncountable time of eternity had come to an end.
1968-1975
GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ was born in an isolated tropical region of Colombia in 1928, but he has lived most of his life in Mexico, Venezuela, Paris, and Spain. He attended the University of Bogota and later worked as staff reporter and film critic for the Colombian newspaper El Espectador. In addition to ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE, which has sold over 5 million copies worldwide, he has written such short fiction as NO ONE WRITES TO THE COLONEL and LEAF STORM. His long-awaited new novel, THE AUTUMN OF THE PATRIARCH, was published in Spanish in 1975 and made its English-language appearance, in the acclaimed Gregory Rabassa translation, in late 1976. Most recently, LA MALA HORA, an early short story, was seen on South American television in the form of a dramatized series. In a short time, it achieved unprecedented success with viewers from every segment of society. Garcia Márquez currently lives with his wife and children in Barcelona.
GREGORY RABASSA is the winner of a National Book Award for Translation. Since 1965, he has translated fifteen books by such authors as Julio Cortázar, Miguel Angel Asturias, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Gabriel Garcia Márquez. Of his contribution to literature, The New York Times has written: "He is one of the best translators who ever drew breath."