Caradoc Evans Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Chris Hopkins

Critical Essay by Chris Hopkins

SOURCE: “Translating Caradoc Evans's Welsh English,” in Style, Vol. 30, No. 3, Fall, 1996, pp. 433–44.

In the following essay, Hopkins provides a systematic analysis of Evans's use of language and translation, asserting that it profoundly influences the meaning of his stories and their impact on English readers.

Though the Welsh writer Caradoc Evans has not achieved the same worldwide recognition as his Irish contemporary James Joyce, he is a writer who resembles his more famous counterpart in a number of ways. Like Joyce he wrote a first book about his own nation that caused much offense and public controversy, making its author immediately notorious. Like Joyce he drew on naturalist techniques to create a highly critical portrait of his own people in the first decade of the twentieth century. Like Joyce he published a collection of linked short stories that seemed intended to represent in a hostile way the...
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