This series called ETCH, Essays and Texts in Cultural History, fills the gap between short articles in obscure journals and lengthy books at inflated prices. The field is the cultural history of Ireland in the broadest sense, including work both in Gaelic and English, non-literary material and foreign commentary. It includes essays, commissioned reprints of valuable items from the past, translations … any kind of material which can increase our awareness of cultural history as it affects Ireland.
When the ETCH series published a selection of brief texts by Daniil Kharms, comparison was made between the absurd world of the Russian absurdist and that of the Irish novelist, Flann O’Brien. Not everyone was pleased by the implied similarity, as if the comparative method robbed the local boy of some of his distinction. The present number in the series answers any provincialism of that kind by making available O’Brien’s idiosyncratic version of a famous play by the Czech dramatist, Karel Čapek. The two authors shared the experience of witnessing the coming into being of an independent state (the Czech republic, the Irish Free State) in the aftermath of the Great War. If further mediation between them were required one has only to consider the novels of Franz Kafka, in which a logic as inescapable and elusive as that of The Third Policeman had earlier been confronted in The Trial and The Castle. The world of central European urban alienation may seem remote from O’Brien’s parodic, raucous provincials, and yet Kafka had been introduced to the English-speaking world by a translator (Edwin Muir) born in the Orkney Islands. Relations between the various epicentres of literary modernism cannot be measured in miles or kilometres, and Rhapsody in Stephen’s Green proceeds in the irreverent confidence that the setting had been claimed by Joyce’s alter ego as ‘my green’ even before the Great War began. In Robert Tracy the dramatic side of O’Brien has found a suitably polyglot advocate, one who is at home in the Slavic languages and who is no respecter of parish boundaries.