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.,