Mexico City - 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 US 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 humour 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. Rumours 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. - Reuters