Fred Turner's Acceptance Address:
The Gjenima Prize is a great honor. The word "honor" is very interesting. It shares its origins with the French words "honnete," from which we get "honest," and "honte," shame. Indeed, I am shamed by this honor, because I know of so many that have deserved it more than I, and I wonder if I can live up to it. But shame is also our greatest incentive to behave ourselves well, so I am called by this prize to a higher level of moral and spiritual and artistic life.
And an honor is also a standard of honesty. We put ourselves on the line when we bestow an honor-we state our promise of what we believe. And to receive an honor, as I do here, is to place upon oneself an obligation to tell the truth, which is the most ancient and profound duty of poets.
In offering this honor, the Gjenima Prize foundation justly honors itself more even than the recipients of the prize. What makes us humans unique among animals is our power of speech, of language. That power is given by birth and luck and education to writers, but to recognize it generously, and to reward it, is an act of great spiritual importance, a way in which we repay God, or Nature, or the gods, for their generosity to our species. In speaking on behalf of all humanity by hosting the award of this prize, the Albanian-American writers confirm their own voice in the great parliament of humankind. And as I have come to perceive in my own brief and recent introduction to Albanian literature, that voice is an eloquent and essential one. And in recent times, a voice of great courage.
I thank you-not only for this award, but for your own part in the literary civilization that keeps the human race human.
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