writing a short speech

You may have seen my ninety-year-old father, as well as my
brothers, my sister, my wife and my daughter, even my granddaughter, now
a year and four months old. But the person who is most on my mind at
this moment, my mother, is someone you will never see. Many people have
shared in the honor of winning this prize, everyone but her.… My
earliest memory was of taking our only vacuum bottle to the public
canteen for drinking water. Weakened by
hunger, I dropped the bottle and broke it. Scared witless, I hid all
that day in a haystack. Toward evening, I heard my mother calling my
childhood name, so I crawled out of my hiding place, prepared to receive
a beating or a scolding. But Mother didn’t hit me, didn’t even scold
me. She just rubbed my head and heaved a sigh.… My most remorseful
memory involves helping Mother sell cabbages at market, and me
overcharging an old villager one jiao – intentionally or not, I can’t
recall – before heading off to school. When I came home that afternoon, I
saw that Mother was crying, something she rarely did. Instead of
scolding me, she merely said softly, “Son, you embarrassed your mother
today.”… My illiterate mother held people who could read in high regard.
We were so poor we often did not know where our next meal was coming
from, yet she never denied my request to buy a book or something to
write with. By nature hard working, she had no use for lazy children,
yet I could skip my chores as long as I had my nose in a book.… A person can
experience only so much, and once you have exhausted your own stories,
you must tell the stories of others. And so, out of the depths of my
memories, like conscripted soldiers, rose stories of family members, of
fellow villagers, and of long-dead ancestors I learned of from the
mouths of old-timers. They waited expectantly for me to tell their
stories. My grandfather and grandmother, my father and mother, my
brothers and sisters, my aunts and uncles, my wife and my daughter have
all appeared in my stories.… I am a storyteller. Telling stories earned
me the Nobel Prize for Literature. Many interesting things have happened
to me in the wake of winning the prize, and they have convinced me that
truth and justice are alive and well. So I will continue telling my
stories in the days to come.Gabriel García Márquez speach:

Antonio Pigafetta, a
Florentine navigator who went with Magellan on the first voyage around
the world, wrote, upon his passage through our southern lands of
America, a strictly accurate account that nonetheless resembles a
venture into fantasy. In it he recorded that he had seen hogs with
navels on their haunches, clawless birds whose hens laid eggs on the
backs of their mates, and others still, resembling tongueless pelicans,
with beaks like spoons. He wrote of having seen a misbegotten creature
with the head and ears of a mule, a camel’s body, the legs of a deer and
the whinny of a horse. He described how the first native encountered in
Patagonia was confronted with a mirror, whereupon that impassioned
giant lost his senses to the terror of his own image.This short and
fascinating book, which even then contained the seeds of our present-day
novels, is by no means the most staggering account of our reality in
that age. The Chronicles of the Indies left us countless others.
Eldorado, our so avidly sought and illusory land, appeared on numerous
maps for many a long year, shifting its place and form to suit the
fantasy of cartographers. In his search for the fountain of eternal
youth, the mythical Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca explored the north of
Mexico for eight years, in a deluded expedition whose members devoured
each other and only five of whom returned, of the six hundred who had
undertaken it…Our independence
from Spanish domination did not put us beyond the reach of madness.
General Antonio López de Santana, three times dictator of Mexico, held a
magnificent funeral for the right leg he had lost in the so-called
Pastry War. General Gabriel García Moreno ruled Ecuador for sixteen
years as an absolute monarch; at his wake, the corpse was seated on the
presidential chair, decked out in full-dress uniform and a protective
layer of medals…… Because they tried to change this state of things,
nearly two hundred thousand men and women have died throughout the
continent, and over one hundred thousand have lost their lives in three
small and ill-fated countries of Central America: Nicaragua, El Salvador
and Guatemala.… However, the
navigational advances that have narrowed such distances between our
Americas and Europe seem, conversely, to have accentuated our cultural
remoteness. Why is the originality so readily granted us in literature
so mistrustfully denied us in our difficult attempts at social change?…
[W]e, the inventors of tales, who will believe anything, feel entitled
to believe that it is not yet too late to engage in the creation of the
opposite utopia. A new and sweeping utopia of life, where no one will be
able to decide for others how they die, where love will prove true and
happiness be possible, and where the races condemned to one hundred
years of solitude will have, at last and forever, a second opportunity
on earth.