The Aran Islands
Synge went to the Aran Islands four times between 1898 and 1901, sent there by Yeats to learn Irish and to listen. The book is a record of those visits: the weather, the fishing, the wakes, the stories he was told and the sentences he wrote down before turning them into dialogue.
It is a travel book by a writer who was already collecting material for plays, and it can be read as an early piece of fieldwork. Synge does not pretend to be invisible, and his presence changes what he is shown. That unease is part of the book's honesty and part of why it is still worth reading.
Public-domain status
First published in 1907. In the United States, works published before 1930 are in the public domain. In the European Union the general term is the life of the author plus 70 years; John Millington Synge died in 1909, so this work has been free to republish there since 1980.
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- Project Gutenberg, ebook no. 4381 — plain text, EPUB and Kindle, checked by us
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Keep reading
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