Máirtín Ó Cadhain, The Road to Brightcity, short stories [from Idir Shúgradh agus Dáirire, 1939, and An Braon Broghach, 1948] translated by Eoghan Ó Tuairisc [with essay intro., pp.7-12] (Poolbeg 1981), 111pp.

CONTENTS [9 stories]: The Withering Branch; The Year 1912; Tabu; Son of the Tax-King; The Road to Brightcity; The Gnarled And Stony Clods; Of Townland’s Tip; The Hare-lip; Floodtide; Going On.

Introduction
After the long struggle Independence and the neurotic civil war which followed, the new Irish Government was wholly unable to supply the dynamic thinking necessary [7] to save Cois Fharraige ‘American Strip’ and all the other Irish-speaking strips from North to South along the Atlantic Coast.

Maire Mhac a’ tSaoi ‘As Maurice has les Landes, so Ó Cadhain has Cois Fharraige’ - [quoted p.9]. The real difficulty of the tongue, and its prime attraction for a modern writer, is its unique mixture of the muck-and-tangle of earth existence with a cosmic view and a sense of ‘otherword’. This otherword sense as Ó Cadhain presents it is a very complex combination of a fundamentalist Christianity, emphasising the Fall of Man, with a large share of the old pagan nature religion. ‘Ghost’, ‘phantom’, ‘fairy’, ‘the dead’, ‘the changeling’, are practically identical terms, and all of them, along with the living, are implicated in a conflict of good and evil, light and dark. Such a worldview is the opposite of romantic, for in it almost all aspects of wild nature - not only sea and storm, but the blue sky, the butterfly, the fine-weather sparkles on the water, the hazelnuts - are felt as hostile, always inhuman, at times malicious. Among the few friendly forces are eggs, fire, greying hair and, oddly enough, hendirt. [10-11]

[…] It is like being confronted with a Roualt Christ where one had expected to see a Jack B Yeats Blackbird Bathing in Tir-na-nOg. [11]

Certain critics have compared Ó Cadhain in Irish to Joyce in English, regarding them as the two giants of twentieth-century prose fiction in Ireland. It is too soon for that kind of dictum, for where is the critic equipped to read both Joyce and Ó Cadhain with equal acumen? Yet the comparison is of some interest. Both men were realists with mythic minds, the were both intoxicated with words, both had a sense of life at once comic and compassionate and saw mankind as forever in exile blundering bout in worlds half-realised. I am not sure whether in fact Ó Cadhain won’t be seen to be il migglior fabbro, having learned in the last resort to keep the myth to himself. [12]

O Cadhain’s language is cool and classic, and free of the self-conscious mannerisms and melancholic word-music of the Synge-song school. [12; end.]

Note
The Son [of the] Tax-King features a ruined castle very much in the mode of the castle of the O’Donoghues, riven by lightning, and a monument to Irish history and its depredations - viz.,

[…] the castle still stood. Those massive piles of stone encrusted with moss and lichens seemed to stand of set purpose, corporeal images, reminders of a wrong once done and then again undone.

Among the Burke castles Clonbeg was one of the most delapidated. It had once been a spacious building … The violent thunderstorm of a few years back had down for the greater part of it. It had knocked the east gable to the ground, the sidewalls unsupported had followed soon after and lay in shattered masses scattered about. It was a wonder to all that the fierce lightening flash which had struck the castle had left even a stone standing … But the west gable which had its back to the [44] bleakness of the irrational West, and faced the fertile cultivated Plain - that gable still stood, last of its warlike phalanx, loath to relinquish its immemorial watch on the Galway Plain. [...] The crows had made their own of this “bare ruined choir” … [45]

 

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