Talk:An Béal Bocht

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An Saol Bocht[edit]

I have heard that, as well as O'Sullivan, O'Crohan, Peig Sayers and so on, there was another Gaeltacht autobiography called something like "An Saol Bocht" (The Poor Life), and that the title of our book was a parody of this. Has anyone any source for this? --Sir Myles na Gopaleen (the da) 14:41, 18 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Found it! There was an Irish language reader called An Saol Mór, The Great Life. This must have been what my informant had in mind (he has since died, so I can't ask him). --Sir Myles na Gopaleen (the da) (talk) 10:12, 13 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Authorship, sources and expansion[edit]

This article has received a lot of affectionate tinkering from fans of the book's English translation, but I find it remarkable (tusé de laoighist) that none of the contributors appear to have noticed that "Flann O'Brien" was merely a pseudonym of Brian O'Nolan, and that O'Nolan did not publish it as a Flann O'Brien novel but as the work of Myles na gCopaleen. This suggests to me, at any rate, that most of those who've worked on the article are not familiar with the actual novel but with the English version. The article has no inline citations, other than the ones I've recently provided, and many of the statements in it seem to be guesswork, rather than being based on basic scholarship. The Power translation is brilliant in many ways, less so in others - for example, he introduces a lot of exclamation marks that are not in the original, and something could be said about that by a better Irish speaker than I. I propose a major overhaul of the article, retaining what's good in it, providing sources where possible for the more contentious remarks, and cutting those which seem to be based on wishful thinking - see WP: Verifiability for the guidelines. I emphasise that these are guidelines, not tramlines; I will not cut anything that seems to me to be likely to be disputed. If anyone has a copy of the original novel, we could use a scan of the front cover. I invite those who have well-sourced information to add it to the article and I volunteer to oversee an edit of it, cleaning up the style and formatting where necessary. Anyone who wants to know my credentials for such a proposal should have a look at what I did to the article on At Swim-Two-Birds. Cheers - Lexo (talk) 00:08, 14 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]

gCopaleen v. Gopaleen[edit]

"his celebrated Irish Times column Cruiskeen Lawn was published under the more anglicised byline of Myles na Gopaleen." Well, no. At least not initially. When An Béal Bocht appeared in December 1941 O'Nolan was still using the full Gaelic name Myles na gCopaleen for his journalism. It would be years before he made the switch to na Gopaleen. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 72.88.67.152 (talk) 01:05, 30 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]

English translation[edit]

The article's intro made it seem as if the P. C. Powers translation appeared in 1996. Sounded weird; my Picador/Pan Books copy is from 1975, and says "first published in Great Britain 1973 by Hart-Davis ... etc". I changed it. Sadly, the references to Ralph Steadman's illustrations and "Dalkey Archive Press" had to go since I'm unsure if either were involved in 1973. The Picador edition has Steadman's stuff though. JöG (talk) 13:52, 17 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]