It Is Still Being Reprinted and Read With Undiminished Interest by New Readers.

Accolade ceremony speech communication

Presentation Speech by Professor Lars Gyllensten of the Swedish Academy

Translation from the Swedish text

Your Majesties, Your Majestic Highnesses, Ladies and Gentlemen,

With this yr's Nobel Prize in Literature to Gabriel García Márquez the Swedish Academy cannot be said to bring forward an unknown author.

García Márquez achieved unusual success as a author with his novel Cien años de soledad in 1967 (One Hundred Years of Solitude). The book has been translated into a large number of languages and has sold millions of copies. It is still being reprinted and read with undiminished interest by new readers. Such a success with a unmarried piece of work could be fatal for a writer with less resources than those possessed by García Márquez. He has, all the same, gradually confirmed his position as a rare storyteller richly endowed with a material, from imagination and experience, which seems inexhaustible. In breadth and epic richness, for instance, the novel El otoño del patriarca, 1975, (The Fall of the Patriarch) compares favourably with the starting time-mentioned work. Short novels such as El coronel no tiene quien le escriba, 1961 (No One Writes to the Colonel), La mala hora, 1962 (An Evil Hour), or last year's Crónica de una muerte anunciada (Chronicle of a Expiry Foretold), complement the picture show of a writer who combines the copious, almost overwhelming narrative talent with the mastery of the witting, disciplined and widely read artist of linguistic communication. A large number of brusque stories, published in several collections or in magazines, give further proof of the keen versatility of García Márquez' narrative gift. His international successes have continued. Each new work of his is received by expectant critics and readers as an event of world importance, is translated into many languages and published as apace equally possible in large editions.

Nor can information technology be said that any literary unknown continent or province is brought to calorie-free with the prize to Gabriel García Márquez. For a long time Latin American literature has shown a vigour every bit in few other literary spheres. It has won acclaim in the cultural life of today. Many impulses and traditions cantankerous each other. Folk culture, including oral storytelling, reminiscences from old Indian culture, currents from Spanish baroque in dissimilar epochs, influences from European surrealism and other modernism are blended into a spiced and life-giving brew. From it García Márquez and other Spanish-American writers derive cloth and inspiration. The violent conflicts of political nature – social and economic – raise the temperature of the intellectual climate. Similar most of the other important writers in the Latin American world, García Márquez is strongly committed politically on the side of the poor and the weak against oppression and economic exploitation. Apart from his fictional production he has been very active as a journalist, his writings beingness many-sided, inventive, often provocative and past no ways limited to political subjects.

The bang-up novels remind ane of William Faulkner. García Márquez has created a earth of his own round the imaginary town of Macondo. In his novels and brusque stories we are led into this peculiar place where the miraculous and the real converge. The extravagant flight of his own fantasy combines with traditional folk tales and facts, literary allusions and tangible – at times obtrusively graphic – descriptions approaching the matter-of-factness of reportage. Every bit with Faulkner, the aforementioned chief characters and modest persons crop up in different stories. They are brought forward into the light in various means – sometimes in dramatically revealing situations, sometimes in comic and grotesque complications of a kind that only the wildest imagination or shameless reality itself tin can reach. Manias and passions harass them. Absurdities of state of war let courage change shape with craziness, infamy with chivalry, cunning with madness.

Expiry is peradventure the most important manager backside the scenes in García Márquez' invented and discovered earth. Oftentimes his stories revolve around a dead person – someone who has died, is dying or will dice. A tragic sense of life characterizes García Márquez' books – a sense of the incorruptible superiority of fate and the inhuman, inexorable ravages of history. But this sensation of death and tragic sense of life is cleaved by the narrative'south unlimited, ingenious vitality, which in its turn is a representative of the at once frightening and edifying vital force of reality and life itself. The one-act and grotesqueness in García Márquez can be cruel, simply tin can likewise glide over into a conciliating humour.

With his stories García Márquez has created a world of his ain which is a microcosmos. In its tumultuous, bewildering nonetheless graphically convincing authenticity information technology reflects a continent and its human riches and poverty.

Perhaps more than than that: a cosmos in which the human heart and the combined forces of history time and again outburst the bounds of chaos-killing and procreation.

Monsieur García Márquez,

Ne disposant que de quelques minutes, je n'ai pu donner de votre œuvre littéraire qu'une prototype d'aspect general et assez abstraite. Certes, vos romans et vos nouvelles sont d'ordre general, ce qui revient à dire qu'elles ont une portée et une signification humaines de cet ordre. Mais elles ne sont pas abstraites. Au contraire, vos~uvres se caractérisent par un rendu du vivant peu commun et une concretion realiste auxquels aucun condense abstrait ne saurait rendre justice. Le mieux que je puisse faire, c'est d'exhorter ceux qui ne les ont pas lues à les lire. C'est bien ce que j'ai fait.

Sur ces paroles, je vous presente les felicitations les plus cordiales de l'Académie Suédoise et je vous invite à recevoir le prix Nobel de littérature des mains de Sa Majesté le Roi.

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