This collection of short stories by a leading figure of the Galician renaissance owes its publication in English to the commitment and expertise of John Rutherford, Xelis de Toro, Benigno Fernando Salgado and their colleagues at the Centre for Galician Studies at The Queen's College Oxford, and also to the courage and enterprise of Planet, an internationalist monthly magazine and small publishing house in West Wales.

Férrin (born 1938) is an archetype of the resistance artist in small, marginalised nations; poet and storyteller, editor and critic, he is also a radical Galician nationalist and political thinker, one of the founders of the Uniòn de Pobo Galego, and one who served several terms in prison for his outspoken opposition to Franco's repression. He is also a lifelong Celtic scholar, who has sought throughout his career to weave threads from other cultures into the already richly Celtic traditions of Galician arts and literature.

The literature of Galicia - in fact the language itself - was at its lowest ebb in the mid-twentieth century, when Férrin committed himself to working within it. Not only was it the long-term victim of centrist oppression and prejudice, culminating in the Francoist terror, but it had become a widely-held view even amongst Galicians that their language was too parochial, too narrow and too primitive to act as a vehicle for high art - a similar pattern in Celtic territories. Galician cultural institutions were also felt to be too weak and impoverished to support a publishing or academic infrastructure. This period has been described by the Galician poet Celso Emilio Ferreiro as "a long night of stone", and it is one measure of Férrin's achievement that Galician literature has achieved a new flowering, capable in his work alone of sustaining genres as different as horror and suspense, political allegory, fantasy and science fiction, and has developed institutions, such as Xunta de Galicia, now capable of stimulating, supporting and guiding a rich crop of self-confident younger writers, artists and musicians.

The volume under review contains short stories from throughout Férrin's long career, from his first collection published in 1958 until his most recent, Arraianos, from 1991. Throughout, he shows himself a master of style and genre, in touch with a wide range of Celtic and other European influences. A darkness runs through much of his work; not only in his pitiless depictions of the cruelty and depravity visited on the helpless by the dictators and their henchmen (see the exposé of Francoist race-hatred and self-indulgence in "Them", the title story, and "Elastic Boots"), but in his cold-eyed deconstructions of peasant life in stories such as "Lobosandus" and "Coffee Liqueur".

It is Férrin's creation of the semi-mystical land of Tagen Ata that has brought him the widest popularity and critical acclaim in recent years, and perhaps it is in the Tagen Ata stories, such as "Return to Tagen Ata" and "Arnoia" that his sinuous and subtle articulation of genres is most striking. At times otherworldly and floating in a mysterious historical timewarp, suggesting the landscapes and themes of y Mabinogi or The High Deeds of Finn McCool, at others seemingly a thinly veiled parable of situations in modern Galicia, the Tagen Ata stories combine the seductive qualities of the worlds created by J.R.R. Tolkien or George MacDonald with the sharp-edged political awareness, and the sympathy for individual, vulnerable, common people of an Orwell or a Harri Webb. Férrin's influence can already be seen in the work of younger Celtic writers such as Robin Llywelyn and Twm Morys in Wales, and it is to be hoped that Planet and the Centre for Galician Studies, with help from organisations such as Mercator, devoted to dissemination of work in minority languages, will succeed in bringing the work of this outstanding European literary figure to the notice even of the notoriously insular English-language audience.  

Copyright © Meic Llewellyn, 2000
This edition copyright © Celtic Cultural Studies, 2000
ISSN 1468-6074