Un Nos Ola Leuad (One Moonlit Night) was first published in 1961: there had never been anything like it in modern Welsh literature, and there has never been anything quite like it written since. Late in 1960 Penguin Books was found not guilty of obscenity for its publication of D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover and, maybe in the aftermath of all that publicity, Caradog Prichard was persuaded by his publisher, Gwasg Gee, to change one line in Un Nos Ola Leuad which contained the word 'fuck'.
The novel is far more shocking than any 'obscenity' could make it. The un-named narrator has returned, either physically or in memory, to the place of his childhood, and as he moves along the moonlit road strong memories assail him of events that happened on similarly moonlit nights when he was young; events which become in the moments of recall more vivid to him than his present situation, so that he remembers them with the incomprehension of the child he once was. In Welsh the words of the novel's title have a sense of 'once upon a time' in them. And what a time it once was for the boy: ultimately raw and brutal as the darkest fairy tale, a time of struggle and poverty, of living on the parish, of constantly feeling ill with hunger, of shaking with fear at what was happening to him, and all of it illuminated by the cold and false light of the moon, a light which drove some of those upon whom it shone out of their minds.
The power of the book lies in Caradog Prichard's unique combination of content and language. The language is the tafodiaith, the dialect or vernacular Welsh, of the quarrying area of Bethesda in Caernarfonshire, which flows into the stream-of-consciousness narrative. Other well-loved authors had written about the lives of the quarrying folk of Caernarfonshire in that era: novelists and short story writers such as Kate Roberts and T. Rowland Hughes wrote moving stories, but their medium was formal literary Welsh, capable of being understood throughout Wales, and they wrote of the dignity and grace of those people who suffered the same poverty and hunger as Prichard's characters. So, Un Nos Ola Leuad was a departure from what people were used to reading. Those outside the north-west of Wales had to struggle with the dialect – think of a Cockney reading Geordie – but it did not deter them. And, surprisingly, the dark portrayal of the quarrying community did not alienate readers: the time of the story was far enough in the past, which is indeed "a foreign country".
This was the exact opposite to the response in Wales earlier in the century to Caradoc Evans's book of short stories, My People, a picture of a semi-fictional community in south-west Wales, which in Wales earned Evans the title of 'the most hated man' for his 'farrago of filth and debased verbal coinage', as one reviewer called it. A later depiction of a small Welsh community was Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood, although the differences far outweigh the similarities. Both these books belong to the other literature of Wales – Welsh writing in English. Un Nos Ola Leuad has been translated into over a dozen languages, has been broadcast and, in 1991, was made into a prize-winning film. The book's appeal endures because of its literary power and because, although its time and place are specific, its themes are universal.
Mari Strachan is the author of The Earth Hums in B Flat. She is bilingual Welsh-English, and lives in Ceredigion, Wales.
