Customer Reviews

Biography with lightness of Heaven and shortness of dance. - By: , 06 Jan 2000
With encouragement from Linguistic scholar George Thomson who visited the western Blasket Isles off Ireland's Kerry coastin 1923, Muiris O'Sullivan writes an insider's account of the last of the ancient celtic lives. It is full of sadness & gentle glimpses of close family & community life but, surprisingly, its most compelling feature is the humour & the modesty of understatement.

In an introduction to the English translation, E.M. Forster writes that Moya Llewelyn Davies (one of the two translators from the original Irish) "isin sensitive touch with the instincts of her countryside".

I have enjoyed both the English & the Irish editions & believe that Moya was the key to the lightness & the lustre of the translation.

Moya was a great "natural" gaelic scholar. Like George, Moya gets a mentionin the text when Muiris (the young islander) visits Dublin for the first time. He stays at Moya's "castle"in Killester on the outskirts of the city. O'Sullivan & Moya were life-long friends. In time, I believe the reputation of O'Sullivan will grow to the point where his anthropological masterpiece will become a cornerstone work for serious students of social studies & indeed I believe it has great potential as a more widely-read piece of complete entertainment.

Moya Llewelyn Davies is an almost forgotton figurein Irish History despite her intimate closeness to Michael Collins & her pivitol rolein the independence movement & the Anglo-Irish peace process of 1921.

Moya's story ("magnificent lamp alight above the door") will be told soon & it would be fitting if her portrait could hang alongside O'Sullivan's & Thomson'sin the National Galleryin Dublin where they belong.

The story of Halloween night with the all-night thrush-hunt, the ventry races where two young runaways down their first pints of stout, the dependence on the sea & the "drowned millionaires" from the Lusitania, luchious scenes of first love, tragic scenes of hopeless emigration to America, outragously funny scenes of innocence slaughtered en route from the Island to Dublin & the final tragedy of the two old men sitting at the fire all alone, the grandfather smoking his pipe, all mix into a picture of a paradise lost & an innocence that can never be regained.

It should rank with the great Irish works of prose & poetry as an essential piece of the Celtic-Irish tapestry.