... very interesting #read
The Islandman by Tomas O'Crohan
Tomas O'Crohan was born on the Great Blasket Island in 1865 and died there in 1937, a great master of his native Irish. He shared to the full the perilous life of a primitive community, yet possessed a shrewd and humorous detachment that enabled him to observe and describe the world. His book is a valuable description of a now vanished way of life; his sole purpose in writing it was in his own words, 'to set down the character of the people about me so that some record of us might live after us, for the like of us will never be again'.
The Blasket Islands are three miles off Irelands Dingle Peninsula. Until their evacuation just after the Second World War, the lives of the 150 or so Blasket Islanders had remained unchanged for centuries. A rich oral tradition of story-telling, poetry, and folktales kept alive the legends and history of the islands, and has made their literature famous throughout the world. The 7 Blasket Island books published by OUP contain memoirs and reminiscences from within this literary tradition, evoking a way of life which has now vanished.
Tomás Ó Criomhthain (anglicised as Tomas O'Crohan or Thomas O'Crohan; 1856 - 1937) was a native of the Irish-speaking Great Blasket Island, 3 kilometres (1.9 miles) off the coast of the Dingle Peninsula in Ireland. He wrote two books, Allagar na h-Inise (Island Cross-Talk) written over the period 1918-23 and published in 1928, and An t-Oileánach (The Islandman), completed in 1923 and published in 1929. Both have been translated into English. The 2012 translation by Garry Bannister and David Sowby is to date the only unabridged version available in English (earlier versions were redacted being considered too earthy).
