EÇA DE QUEIRÓS (1845–1900) is considered to be Portugal’s greatest novelist. Born in the small town of Povoa de Varzim in northern Portugal, José Maria Eça de Queirós was the son and grandson of magistrates and the product of a secret love affair—his parents married four years after his birth. After studying law at Coimbra, he came of age intellectually as part of the Generation of ’70, a group of writers, artists, and thinkers concerned with breaking socio-cultural traditions and connecting Portugal to the modern movements in the rest of Europe. For six months he worked in Leira as a municipal administrator which provided him the rich setting for The Crime of Father Amaro, the first Portuguese “realist” novel ever written. Much of his life was spent abroad as a diplomat, though he wrote prodigiously—novels, essays, letters, journalistic chronicles, and short stories.
MARGARET JULL COSTA is one of our time’s greatest translators from Spanish and Portuguese. For New Directions, she has translated three novels by Javier Marías—All Souls, A Heart So White (winner of the 1997 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award), and Tomorrow in the Battle Think On Me—as well as a collection of his short stories, When I Was Mortal. Forthcoming Marías novels translated by Jull Costa include The Man of Feeling and Your Face Tomorrow. Other books she has translated for New Directions include Requiem by Antonio Tabucchi and The Club of Angels by Luis Fernando Verissimo. She won the 1992 Portuguese Translation Prize for The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa, and in 2000 she won the Weidenfeld Translation Prize for José Saramago’s All the Names. She has also translated the works of Spanish-language writers Bernardo Atxaga, Carmen Martín Gaite and Juan José Saer; and the Portuguese writer Mário de Sá-Carneiro.