Hello and welcome to the witness podcast with me Mike Lanchen and today we're going back to

1990 when the poet and essayist Octavio Pass became the first Mexican to receive the

Nobel Prize for literature.

I will speak here, of course, in Spanish.

Convenso with a paler.

I begin with a word that all men have uttered since the dawn of humanity.

Thank you.

And with these simple words, Octavio Pass, the great man of Mexican literature, opened his acceptance speech at the Swedish

Academy of Letters in December of 1990.

He spoke in characteristically lyrical language.

If each of my words were a drop of water,

you would see through them and glimpse what I feel.

Gratitude, acknowledgement. And also an indefinable

nixtue of fear, respect and surprise at finding myself here

before you in this place which is the home of both Swedish learning and world literature.

I called him to congratulate him and he said to me you know Alberto awards are always a misunderstanding.

They give you the awards for something that is not exactly what you tried to do

or what you did. But it's better a happy

misunderstanding and he said this is a very very happy misunderstanding.

I think that the Nobel Prize made him a very public figure.

Everybody wanted to get a little bit of him, get that sort of aura.

I heard him talking about it, in a slightly dismissive way because he

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