Donoso obsessive subject is the decay of the Chilean bourgeoisie, but he vigorously rejects anything reminiscent of traditional realism or the portrayal of regional customs. In This Sunday (1966), he focuses on a family's activities on Sundays in order to view the boredom, passions, and misery of Chilean bourgeois society and its servants. The Obscene Bird of Night (1970) deals with the decline of feudal society through the story of a landholding family in a kaleidoscopic vision of decay and outrageous behavior.
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.