Gabriel Garcia Marquez IS a hoax

[Vassegh, Robert F]

Since I'm a digest member, I apologize for a potential double/triple post.  

'Farewell poem' fools readers 
Reuters 
MEXICO CITY (Reuters) -- A poem published in several Latin American
newspapers this week and said to be a farewell ode by Colombia's ailing
Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez turned out on Wednesday to be the work
of a little-known ventriloquist. 
The poem titled "La Marioneta" -- "The Puppet" -- appeared under Garcia
Marquez's name on Monday in the Peruvian daily La Republica. Mexico City
dailies reproduced it on Tuesday and it was read on local radio stations. 
"Gabriel Garcia Marquez sings a song to life," read a headline in Mexico
City's La Cronica, which on Tuesday published the poem superimposed on a
photo of the novelist on its front page. 
"My God, if I had a bit of life I would not let one instant go by without
telling the people I love that I love them," read the sentimental poem that
also circulated on the Internet. 
But like the speech supposed to have been given by U.S. novelist Kurt
Vonnegut in 1997 urging graduates at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology (MIT) to use sun screen, the author of "La Marioneta" turn out
not nearly as famous as advertised. 
"I'm feeling the disappointment of someone who has written something and is
not getting credit," ventriloquist Johnny Welch told Mexico's InfoRed radio
on Wednesday. 
Welch, who has worked for 15 years as a ventriloquist in Mexico and other
parts of Latin America, said he wrote the poem for his puppet sidekick
"Mofles." 
"I'm not a writer," he confessed. 
In 1997 a humor column by Chicago Tribune columnist Mary Schmich was widely
redistributed on the Internet, but was incorrectly billed as an MIT
commencement address by Vonnegut. 
Garcia Marquez won the Nobel prize for literature in 1982. His seminal work,
"100 Years of Solitude," has been translated into 36 languages and sold
millions of copies worldwide. 
In an October 1999 interview with New Yorker magazine, the 73-year-old
author acknowledged having been treated for lymphatic cancer in the summer
of 1999 in Los Angeles. Rumors of his failing health have surfaced several
times in Latin America in recent months. 
Garcia Marquez did not comment publicly on the apocryphal poem, but several
close associates denied he had anything to do with it. "It's a shame there
are such good forgeries of paintings but such lousy forgeries of
literature," Argentine author Tomas Eloy Martinez told Mexico City's Reforma
newspaper.