Recovering an Irish Voice from the American Frontier
About
- Included in Comhar magazine's Best Books of 2021
A bilingual compilation of stories by Eoin Ua Cathail, an Irish emigrant, based loosely on his experiences in the West and Midwest.
The author draws on the popular American Dime Novel genre throughout to offer unique reflections on nineteenth-century American life. As a member of a government mule train accompanying the U.S. military during the Plains Indian Wars, Ua Cathail depicts fierce encounters with Native American tribes, while also subtly commenting on the hypocrisy of many famine-era Irish immigrants who failed to recognize the parallels between their own plight and that of dispossessed Native peoples. These views are further challenged by his stories set in the upper Midwest.
His writings are marked by the eccentricities and bloated claims characteristic of much American Western literature of the time, while also offering valuable transnational insights into Irish myth, history, and the Gaelic Revival movement. This bilingual volume, with facing Irish-English pages, marks the first publication of Ua Cathail’s work in both the original Irish and in translation. It also includes a foreword from historian Richard White, a comprehensive introduction by Mahoney, and a host of previously unpublished historical images.
Praise for this book
"The tragic parallel between Irish immigrants who fled famine in their former nation and dispossessed Native peoples is not lost on Ua Cathail, even as he notes how it seems to be lost on other Irish immigrants of his time. Recovering an Irish Voice from the American Frontier is a fascinating primary testimony, given to embellishments and eccentricities, yet also providing a unique window into the American frontier a century and a half in the past."
"As of 1876, the year of the Battle of Little Big Horn, a third of General Custer's famous Seventh Cavalry were Irish, a statistic Ó Mathúna provides in a perceptively wide-ranging introductory essay that places Ua Cathail's prose into the dual contexts of the Irish presence in the American West and the popular accounts of white American settlement in that region. . . . The stories provide a neat encapsulation of a specific moment in the history of Irish migration to North America and of the ways that Irish people engaged with the mythologies of the American frontier."
"The fact that these texts were written in Irish has resulted in their erasure from any serious study until now. In bringing scholarly attention to these stories once more, Mahoney has his finger assuredly on the pulse of current and developing trends in Irish Studies."
“At a time when scholars in the field of Irish-language studies have renewed and expanded their interest in the language and its culture, from survivals of folklore to contemporary transnational writing among the Irish diaspora, this first edition of Ua Cathail’s prose narratives is assured a place in reading lists of related academic courses."
"What makes the book exceptional . . . are Mahoney's translations from Ua Cathail's Irish to American English. . . . The text naturally reads quickly, with one page in Irish, and the other in English. A quick read, however, limits readers' understanding of the stories and their importance. It denies readers the time to peruse footnotes that provide valuable context and references-- a type of fact- finder within the fiction."