Tomás O'Crohan (1856–1937)

This book is the autobiography of Tomas O’Crohan (O Criomhthain) and his life on the Great Blasket island, off the coast of Dingle Peninsula in southwest Ireland. Born around 1855, the author provides an account of his life on the Island, where poverty was the norm and daily life was hard and focused on securing the basic necessities for survival.

Homes in Tomas' childhood were extremely small, one-room structures, erected of stones and clay-mortar, with turf and reed/rush roofs. Divided by a dresser or cupboard, the home was shared with a family’s domestic animals - cows, calves, pigs, hens, donkeys and dogs. The islanders’ diet consisted mainly of potatoes and fish. Produce was very limited and hunting and fishing were essential survival activities, often conducted cooperatively with others. Rabbits were hunted with ferrets, swimmers entered caves to capture seals, fish were netted, lobsters trapped, dolphins beached and killed, and food and materials salvaged from occasional shipwrecks. Activities in and around the sea were inherently dangerous, resulting in many deaths.

Visits from neighbors and relatives were frequent, with singing a main entertainment, and occasional trips made to other islands and to Dingle on the mainland. The island’s isolation caused school to be somewhat sporadic, dependent on the availability of a teacher. However, this isolation, as well the dangers inherent in reaching the Blaskets and the aggressive reaction of residents, also impeded landlords and government officials from collecting rental debt and taxes.

Marriage choices were often largely a matter of practicalities. O’Crohan wed Mary Keane in 1878. While he was most interested in a different girl living on another island, this marriage was arranged by his sister on the basis that Mary was also an islander. To marry a girl from another island would bring with it the obligation of providing assistance to her relatives, while the family of a fellow islander could be of help if needed. Once Mary was selected as the betrothed, the marriage was scheduled for two weeks later, consistent with the custom that all marriages take place during Shrovetide.

Most of O'Crohan's narrative is focused on hunting and fishing, and the frequent, heavy drinking that invariably followed any important events, whether work or leisure. In one of the few instances where he directly acknowledges the harsh conditions of life on the Island, he explains that “The drink used to affect us more than it did other people because we used to be constantly worn out by our way of life, like a horse that never had any respite or peace. …It wasn’t the desire of the drink itself that made us long for it, but to have a merry night instead of the hardship that often awaited us.”

What O’Crohan did not include in his remembrances is thought-provoking - perhaps revealing of the island’s culture or maybe the result of early editors’ decisions. Virtually nothing of Tomas and Mary’s married life was included, and it was not until late in the book, and then mostly in the context of illness and death, that any of their ten children were even mentioned - an eldest son died at age eight in an accidental fall into the sea while trying to catch seagulls, two children died during a whooping cough and measles outbreak, an eighteen year old son died trying to save a drowning girl, and a married daughter had six children over the course of twelve years, before herself dying. Death was a frequent occurrence on the islands and O’Crohan notes that “Of all the terrible things that have ever happened to me, dealing with death has always been the most difficult of all.” Yet the death of the author’s wife is described in only one sentence: “The deep sorrow of losing our children took its toll on my wife, and she was never the same afterwards until the day she died – so she didn’t make old bones either.”

While the author’s account of island life was interesting, what I ultimately found most absorbing was the interplay of its being written, edited and translated. I have seen references to "authorship" being variously assigned to O’Crohan, editors of the Gaelic editions, and the translators to English. O’Crohan was the first to write of life on this island, although he seems an unlikely author, being self-taught in reading and writing his native Irish. His original account was written in pieces over an extended period of time, (his last chapter written in 1928 at around age 73, at which time only five others remained on the island older than he) and afterwards edited by many, with different Gaelic editions issued in 1929, 1973 and 2002. Two translations to English exist, the first by Robin Flower in 1934, based on a 1929 edition and entitled The Islandman. The translation that I read, The Islander: Complete and Unabridged by Garry Bannister and David Sowby, was based on the 2002 Gaelic edition compiled by Professor Sean O Coileain and published in 2012.

Which is the preferred translation is a matter of some debate, addressed in both the Foreword by Professor Alan Titley and the Preface by Professor Sean O Coileain. Flower had the advantage of a friendship with O’Crohan and therefore access to discussion with the author. (Sean O Coileain also spent time on the island with the author in compiling his Gaelic edition.) Flower’s version retains more of the vernacular, at times using words and phrasing whose meaning is perhaps less clear to the average reader. In addition, Flower omits some passages that were included in the original manuscript, due to cultural sensitivities of the time.

The translation by Bannister and Sowby is reported to be complete and unabridged, and five appendices are labeled as pages from the first edition. Their stated goals were to produce a narrative guided by clarity and readability. The result is writing described as “…common, colloquial English…”: simple, direct language, largely absent the original Irish idiom, but still effective in conveying a clear, simple image, such as the following. “I remember being at my mother’s breast. She used to bring me up the hill in a creel for carrying turf. When the creel was full of turf, I used to be under her arm on our way home.” (Note that Tomas was not weaned until he was four years old.)

In his Foreword, Professor Alan Titley states that the “Problem of all translation is one of feeling and echoes. Each language has its own history, which is not the history of any other language, and the taste of a word in one is not the taste of its translation in another.” He further quotes Robin Flower: “Irish and English are so widely separated in their mode of expression that nothing like a literal translation from one language to the other is possible.”

This translation of O'Crohan's narrative is the result of a work originally written in Gaelic by an amateur author, which was then interpreted over time by many editors and folklorists, before the most recent Gaelic edition was compiled by Sean O Coileain. Even Barrington and Sowby’s translation to English involved several stages, taking ten years and intended at first as a guide to accompany efforts to read the original Gaelic text, which failed due to the difficulties of literal translation from Gaelic to English. They then rewrote and restructured the first translation into the final version.

Considering this long journey to publication in English, it is hard not to contemplate what has changed or been lost in content and in tone from O’Crohan’s original Gaelic.… (meer)

This is a re-read; first read almost 50-years ago -- gosh! In 1972, we had just returned from a two-year stay in Northern Ireland and had had the occasion to visit Dingle and gaze across the sound to the Blaskets. The Islandman is a memoir of the life and times in a unique culture that has since vanished. Not twenty years before I read the book, the last of the Blasket residents had been removed from the island to the mainland. (Now, I understand, you can cross the sea to tour the island, and even get accommodations there.)

The islanders produced books about its inhabitants that reflect their lives on this remote place. O'Crohan relates so vividly what life was like in his time for he and his fellow Blasketers. His story, told so enchantingly, is the story of a culture and community with a way of life that to us today would seem harsh. The Blasketers fished in curraghs in the dangerous seas around them and grew meager crops of potatoes and oats in the nearly worthless land on the island (gathering sea weed for manure was a method of eking out production.) Their diets were mostly fish and potatoes; seal hunts occasionally provided supplemental meat to their tables. They benefited at times from salvaging debris from ships that foundered on the rocks and shoals. O'Crohan tells of retrieving a substance that made a good dye for clothing to find out later that it was tea, a product unknown to them before.

Their houses were rude and spare; read about how domestic animals would reside with the occupants in the house and how chickens would roost in the thatch roofs where eggs could be retrieved. They were poor and knew it, but lived full and rich lives nonetheless.

The islanders were exclusive speakers of Irish, a version so pure that scholars and others interested in the early 20th century Irish language revival visited to study and experience the purity of the language. The translation of "The Islandman" to English by Robin Flowers is excellent in relating the rhythm of the Irish language.

O'Crohan concludes his story of their lives by writing poignantly "I have written minutely of much that we did, for it was my wish that somewhere there should be a memorial of it all, and I have done my best to set down the character of the people about me so that some record of us might lives after us, for the like of us will never be again."

Other books by the Blasketers include "Island Cross-Talk" by O'Crohan, "Twenty Years A-Growing" by Maurice O'Sullivan and "Pieg" by Pieg Sayers. They are all highly recommended.… (meer)