Writer Sergio Pitol leaves us
It is always sad when a person dies, and if it is a prominent celebrity of culture, the feeling of grief can touch thousands of hearts. Mexican writer Sergio Pitol, a multifaceted author and winner of the Cervantes Literature Prize in 2005, died last Thursday at the age of 85, informed the Minister of Culture of Mexico.
"We regret the departure of Sergio Pitol. We celebrate his life and his literary legacy, in which he contributed to the universal letters an original narrative work, translations and essays that will last through the years", said Minister María Cristina García through Twitter.
Born in Puebla on March 18, 1933, Pitol fell in love with literature during childhood, when bedridden by malaria was devoted to read avidly.
"Illness led me to reading", Pitol recalled in his acceptance speech of the Cervantes´s Prize, in which he attributed the emergence of his vocation to authors such as William Faulkner, Franz Kafka or Jorge Luis Borges, as well as his university teachers. "I am sure that without them I would not have reached this day".
The author studied law and letters at the National Autonomous University of Mexico and published his first story in 1957. In 1961 he traveled to Europe and from there he began a journey of almost 30 years as a teacher, translator and cultural attaché of Mexico in cities of that continent and China as well.
In 1972 he published the first of his five novels, "El tañido de la flauta", although he also wrote stories, essays and memoirs, as well as a vast work as a translator of English, Polish, Italian, Russian, Hungarian and Chinese. Pitol criticized in recent years the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which governed Mexico for more than 70 consecutive years until 2000, between the lights and shadows of authoritarianism and corruption.
The PRI "has not changed. It's the same: money, corruption, impunity ... It's more dangerous, because it pretends it's another and it's not like that", he told the Spanish newspaper El País in an interview in July 2012, when the party had just won the election that gave him back the presidency after two periods of alternation.
Among other distinctions, he was awarded in 1984 with the prize Herralde of Novel for his work "El desfile del amor" and with the National Literature Prize of Mexico in 1993. Pitol lived from the beginning of the 1990s in the city of Xalapa, Veracruz, where he dedicated himself to writing and university teaching, work that was left before the growth of progressive aphasia that was detected in 2009.
