Publisher: Cockatrice Books, 2017 | ISBN: 978-1912368143 | Format: 20.3×12.7cm paperback | Length: 160 pages | Price: £7.99.
A former farmhand from the Conwy valley returns from England to stop a wedding, and to see if a snare he once set has sprung. A bridegroom in Nant Gwrtheyrn devotes his life to finding the bride who has disappeared without trace. A kindly old man from Esgair Adda tells his nephew two ghost stories from his youth, and a young man staying at a country house for Hallowe’en sets his hopes on marrying his host’s young daughter.
Owen Wynne Jones, also known as Glasynys (1828-1870) was a school-teacher, and clergyman, an editor and poet, and an influential figure in the eisteddfod movement. But he was a also a folklorist and short-story writer, whose contributions to the Welsh anthology, Cymru Fu (1864), influenced T. Gwynn Jones among others, and now, in this new translation by Rob Mimpriss, a body of his work is available to English readers.
Combining horror, romance, humour and adventure with his own moving descriptions of the hospitality and generosity of ordinary people, these stories provide an account of a way of life now vanished, and a glimpse into the extraordinary richness of the Welsh oral tradition.
‘Glasynys had a message for his age, for the common people of Wales who saw him championing their heritage. A sectarian, divided, unpoetic age crushes the spirit, and defaces the life of man. Glasynys describes his dream of the common people of Wales, learned in song and dance, and living through poetry alongside fairies, monsters, spirits and dragons... We enter his world, and delight in his dream.’
Saunders Lewis
‘An invaluable translation.’
Angharad Price
Dr Sarah Gallup is a clinical psychologist at the California Department of State Hospitals. She also runs a podcast exploring the history of mental health care and the stories of people who lived or worked Behind the Walls of the World’s Psychiatric Hospitals. In six recent episodes she reads from Dangerous Asylums...
Read postAll newsThe day was dull, rather misty, and wet under foot, but neither too warm nor too cold for walking. I began to think (without being especially aware that I was thinking) about the place of blood in Christian iconography, about the chapel in which I was raised, which seemed mildly obsessed with it...
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‘freely and fiercely inventive short stories… supercharged with ideas.’
Jon Gower, Nation Cymru
‘heaving with loss, regret and familial bonds.’
Annexe Magazine
‘sketched with a depth and sureness of touch which makes them memorable and haunting.’
Caroline Clark, gwales.com
‘dark, complex, pensively eloquent’
Sophie Baggott, New Welsh Review
Translated by T. Gwynn Jones, with an introduction by Rob Mimpriss.
‘Lucid, skilful, and above all, of enormous timely significance.’
Jim Perrin
‘In this exemplary collaboration between medical science and imagination, lives preserved in official records, in the language and diagnoses of their times, are restored not just to light, but to humanity and equality. This anthology is a resurrection.’
Philip Gross
‘An invaluable translation.’
Angharad Price
Translated by Rob Mimpriss, with an introduction by E. Morgan Humphreys