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Starting from Myles’ playful advertisement of book-handling services, the paper explores O’Brien’s/Myles’ systematic recycling, rewriting and inscribing of modernist texts and narrative devices, imbricated with the featuring of second-hand and repurposed objects. I argue for a provocative self-positioning of Flann’s/Myles’ texts and their recasting of modernist authorship and the authority of the author in the context of the increasing relevance, and ever faster obsolescence, of commodity culture in the first half of the twentieth century. The collage/assemblage of texts belonging to different genres, ages, languages and aesthetics is situated at the interface between Handlung with its corollary, the ethos of productivity, and handling, reuse and repurposing, at an ironic angle to the modernist slogan, “make it new”.

Starting from Myles’ playful advertisement of book-handling services, the paper explores O’Brien’s/Myles’ systematic recycling, rewriting and inscribing of modernist texts and narrative devices, imbricated with the featuring of second-hand and repurposed objects. I argue for a provocative self-positioning of Flann’s/Myles’ texts and their recasting of modernist authorship and the authority of the author in the context of the increasing relevance, and ever faster obsolescence, of commodity culture in the first half of the twentieth century. The collage/assemblage of texts belonging to different genres, ages, languages and aesthetics is situated at the interface between Handlung with its corollary, the ethos of productivity, and handling, reuse and repurposing, at an ironic angle to the modernist slogan, “make it new”. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article proposes Irish radio broadcasting as an unexplored context for new directions in Flann O’Brien studies. Brian O’Nolan’s involvement in Irish radio spans at least two decades, from the early 1930s into the 1950s, yet the contributions of O’Nolan and his literary circle to Radio Éireann and the BBC remain an under-researched area of Flann O’Brien scholarship. Scholars are faced with the absence of a sound archive to refer to; but this article argues that such absences are part of the ephemeral nature of radio as a medium, and that we must view O’Nolan’s work in radio as an emerging, amateur practice within a wider, sustained artistic project. Though we cannot resurrect the live performances themselves, the article draws on new archival evidence to offer a short history of O’Nolan’s radio appearances. It attempts to fill the gaps produced by lost media with original radio schedules, reviews, letters, and typescript drafts, and by contextualising O’Nolan’s portrayals of radio within a wider social and technological milieu, via the radio-related activity of his circle (Niall Sheridan, Donagh MacDonagh, Niall Montgomery). This context helps us to see how radio aesthetics influenced O’Nolan’s metafictional writing, as demonstrated through close readings of how the modernist ‘radio’ mode informed ‘!CEÓL!’ (1932), Blather (1934), and At Swim-Two-Birds (1939).

Clare Marie Moriarty reports on Strange Atmospheres: The Seventh International Flann O’Brien Conference, Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, 27‒30 June 2023.

Lloyd (Meadhbh) Houston’s Irish Modernism and the Politics of Sexual Health combines archival research with incisive textual analysis to examine how topics such as sex, fertility, contraception, hygiene, and eugenics were circulated in Ireland from the end of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. Reading medical case studies and newspaper articles alongside literary works by J.M. Synge, W.B. Yeats, Samuel Beckett, Kate O’Brien, and Brian O’Nolan, Houston’s book is a remarkable history of sexual politics and sexual rhetoric in Irish public life.

John Greaney's The Distance of Irish Modernism: Memory, Narrative, Representation explores a point of tension in Irish Studies between modernist aesthetics and postcolonial historiography. Challenging the theoretical paradigms prevalent in contemporary Irish Studies, the book invites us to interrogate the meta-historical and political narratives that inform our reading of literary works by Samuel Beckett, Flann O’Brien, Elizabeth Bowen, John McGahern, and Kate O’Brien.

During the 1950s and 1960s influenza was a recurring theme in the Cruiskeen Lawn, a satirical column by Myles na Copaleen (Flann O'Brien) in The Irish Times. The columns' engagement arose from Ireland's experience of brutal influenza seasons and, in particular, the 1957-58 pandemic, known at the time as the Asian Flu. The pandemic's virus killed approximately over a million people worldwide, but until our recent, COVID-inspired interest in historical outbreaks, has received very limited critical engagement. In this article I take Flann O'Brien's The Dalkey Archive as a case study through which to explore literary studies' amnesia regarding medical history, specifically the 1957-58 pandemic, subsequent influenza outbreaks, and associated bacterial complications. Weaving together O'Brien's correspondence, journalism and final completed novel, I propose a new way of understanding The Dalkey Archive, one that deprioritises its connections to politics and presents it instead as a response to the symptoms and strains of pandemics and outbreaks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The central aim of this article is to explore the politics of the archive and archival mnemonics in Flann O’Brien’s last novel, The Dalkey Archive (1964). The argumentative axis moves along the relation between archival power and authorial agency, especially in terms of re/imagining alternative histories/archives. Relying on the metaphor of the book as an archive, and the author as an archivist, the article introduces a reading of the novel within the historical context of Ireland’s post-independence intellectual and political climate. O’Brien’s biting dark humour, which exposes the ideological fictionality of archival constructs and debunks canonical authority, is shown to introduce a critical commentary on many aspects of the relationship between authorship and power.

A tribute to the artist Edward (Eddie) O’Kane (1948–2022) – whose Flann O’Brien artworks were exhibited across the world and adorn a series of O’Brien books – written by his children David O’Kane and Marianne O’Kane Boal.

In Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds, a postmodernist novel avant la lettre, literary entities rewrite literary texts, including those in which they exist and I argue that they do so through metaleptic rewriting and in pursuit of different types of authorial justice, all of which are infelicitous. The novel’s intense self-reflexivity and intricate metafictional games create a foundation that is too fluid to sustain the weight of a heavy concept such as justice. Thus, myriad fictional worlds filled with authors wishing to impose what they deem to be fair in their own literary universe interact, intersect and overlap, allowing their justice-motivated characters to metaleptically transgress their ontological levels in order to undo the wrongs of their authors. Yet, in a novel that promotes itself as ‘a self-evident sham’, such attempts are mocked at every step and the quest for fairness is replaced by the thirst for authorial power.

Joseph Nugent reports on Flannagain in Far Amurikey: VI International Flann O’Brien Conference, Boston College, 6‒9 April 2022.

Flann O'Brien: Gallows Humour is the first study to offer a sustained focus on biopolitical themes in the work of Brian O’Nolan. With this collection, editors Ruben Borg and Paul Fagan show how wider vistas are now clearly open for research into the post-Revival politics of the Irish writer, but also how a more refined lens on the historical and political environment that nurtured (or, indeed, stoked the ire of) O’Nolan’s wit can provide tantalising new avenues for investigation. It is in this dual movement—of expanding scope and concentrated focus—that the critical merit of Gallows Humour lies, as it affords future scholars a wealth of novel methodologies and a multitude of exciting critical directions.

This article discusses The Third Policeman through the lens of a dialectic of enchantment and disenchantment that is firmly anchored in the history of anthropological discourse on bureaucracy (Malinowski, Lévi-Strauss, Tambiah, Herzfeld, Graeber, Jones). From this angle, Flann O’Brien’s novel is examined as an aesthetic illustration of an essentially anthropological argument: although bureaucracy has been described as an eminently rational form of social systematisation, regulation, and control (since Weber), it also functions, paradoxically, as a symbolic site for irrationality and supernatural occurrences, haunted by madness, mystery, and delusion. The novel is intriguing partly due to its nonchalant, humorous entwining of seemingly incompatible imageries (in this case, magic and officialdom) – a strategy that proves effective not only for creating fantastic ambiguity, but also for reworking a predilect theme of bureaucratic fiction: the coexistence of rational and irrational modes of thinking, in an infinite circling around the absurd oddities of an incomprehensible Law and the impenetrable opacity of its higher powers.

This essay addresses a relatively untouched topic in the field of Brian O’Nolan / Flann O’Brien studies: the Irish-language “Tales from Corkadorky” vignettes published during 1941–42 in the “Cruiskeen Lawn” column O’Nolan wrote as Myles na gCopaleen for the Irish Times. This essay builds on the brief existing critical remarks about this series of columns by exploring, in unprecedented detail, Breandán Ó Conaire’s suggestion that the “Tales from Corkadorky” are modelled on the Sgéalta Mhuintir Luinigh (Munterloney Folktales) collected by Professor Éamonn Ó Tuathail and published in 1933. After summarising existing criticism, the essay presents the wider context of folklore collection for O’Nolan’s work in Irish, the background linking him to Ó Tuathail’s Sgéalta Mhuintir Luinigh, and proceeds to conduct a comparative reading of O’Nolan’s use of dialect features and themes from this source material in the “Tales from Corkadorky”. Facilitated by its analysis of the first tale to appear, the essay traces the origin and development of the tale format as it interacts with other recurring elements in “Cruiskeen Lawn”.

This article examines the intellectual exchange and literary collaboration between John Garvin and Brian O’Nolan, exploring the dynamics of their relationship on three different levels. Professionally, Garvin was O’Nolan’s superior when O’Nolan joined the Irish Civil Service in 1935, and he remained an influential senior figure in their department until O’Nolan left in 1953. On a literary level, Garvin read an early draft of the At Swim-Two-Birds manuscript and provided its epigraph (sourced from Euripides’s Heracles), receiving editorial input from O’Nolan on his published writing on James Joyce in return. Socially, Garvin and O’Nolan belonged to an intellectual circle (including R. M. Smyllie, Alec Newman, Donagh MacDonagh, and Niall Montgomery) which brought together journalists, writers, and other Dublin professionals in the Palace Bar. This article argues for the significance of these collaborations by using first-hand accounts, letters, journalism, and critical work, including Garvin’s 1976 book, James Joyce’s Disunited Kingdom and the Irish Dimension. In doing so, the article reconstructs a dialogue that took place between bureaucratic methods of state administration and the aesthetic strategies of modernism, with Joyce at its centre, an exchange that shaped O’Nolan’s poetics and exerted influence over his circle.

This guest editorial introduces the topic of this special issue, ‘Brian O’Nolan and the Irish Civil Service,’ and sets out some key points on why the theme of bureaucracy should be considered more closely in O’Nolan criticism. At the same time, the editorial sketches out aspects of the current political and cultural context in which the issue approaches the bureaucrat as a topic of discussion. Calling to attention certain critical interventions on the question of how writers operate when they are concurrently state functionaries, the note sets the stage for O’Nolan to be re-considered as a ‘writer-official.’ Introducing the articles which make up the issue, the authors point towards how the contributors have taken on such a task of critical re-orientation. The note concludes with an appendix, which provides a detailed timeline of O’Nolan’s career in the Irish Civil Service.

Myles na gCopaleen, pseudonym for Brian O'Nolan (1911–66), was the author of popular Irish Times column Cruiskeen Lawn, published with varying frequency from October 1940 to April 1966. The column hosted Myles's multifarious – and often comic – observations on a vast array of topics, including science, theology, language, daily trivialities and, quite centrally, politics. In June 1959, two electoral events were held in Ireland: the Irish presidential election, and the referendum on the abolishment of the modality of proportional representation which formed the basis of the Irish electoral system. This article examines Myles's engagement with both events, which were publicly dominated by the then Taoiseach (later President-elect) Éamon de Valera (1882–1975), with the twofold aim of reassessing the importance of Irish politics within Cruiskeen Lawn and pinpointing the author's individual thoughts on the issues and parties concerned. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Report on the 110 Myles: Flann O’Brien at a Distance online Symposium, 26‒28 July 2021.

Review of Katherine Ebury, Modern Literature and the Death Penalty, 1890–1950 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021).

Review of ‘The Ever Widening Spiral’ (Alley Theatre and Strabane and Sperrin Visitor Information Centre, 27 September–15 October 2021).

Review of Andrew Gaedtke, Modernism and the Machinery of Madness: Psychosis, Technology, and Narrative Worlds (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).

Review of Flann O'Brien, The Collected Letters of Flann O’Brien, ed. Maebh Long (Victoria, TX: Dalkey Archive Press, 2018).

The notion of soundless music seems contradictory, even absurd: the concept of soundless musical experience less so. In this article, I explore two quite different descriptions of this kind of experience as set out in two mid-twentieth-century Irish novels. In one, Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman, the narrator watches one of the titular sergeants enjoy music that he – the narrator – cannot hear. In the second, Ralph Cusack's Cadenza, the narrator watches as a village priest mimes playing the piano on a café table, a performance he 'hears' and appreciates. Speculatively combining and extending these episodes, and using the figures of the philistine and the aesthete in Adorno's Aesthetic Theory as a key, I suggest that an anxiety about music and musical expression characterized the newly independent Ireland, an anxiety linked to wider concerns often read as 'postcolonial'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Review of Flann O’Brien: Problems with Authority, edited by Ruben Borg, Paul Fagan, and John McCourt (Cork University Press, 2017).

Brian Ó Nualláin is a man of many names and many voices. The narrative power he posseses is exemplified when comparing 'The Plain People of Ireland' segments of the Cruiskeen Lawn columns in The Irish Times, penned under the pseudonym Myles na gCopaleen, and the voice of the nameless narrator in Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman. Within these two works, the position of the intellectual in Irish society is portrayed through quite different lenses: the self-confident, perpetually correct Myles, and the timid, obsessively rational narrator. While both voices are erudite and authoritative, their positioning within the environments they inhabit could not be more different. This article examines the positioning of the 'intellectual narrator' in Ireland, as portrayed by the various voices of Ó Nualláin, focusing specifically on the tone utilised throughout the respective pieces to differentiate the social standing of the narrators from those they encounter. The mastery of language apparent in both 'The Plain People of Ireland' and The Third Policeman subverts the expected portrayal of a public intellectual, destabilising the inherent class politics that imbue both works without dismantling them all together.

Brian O'Nolan has not become a widely known author in Poland and the Czech Republic. He nevertheless has some presence in the two countries, mainly under his most popular pen name, Flann O'Brien. The article studies the strategies of presenting the writer and the context of his work in the paratexts of translations to Polish and Czech. It concentrates of two recurring themes: one is the connection to James Joyce and other major literary figures, the other--the Irish-language. The former predominates in the Polish reception, while the latter is characteristic to Czech paratexts. Together with the selection of texts to be translated, this forms a different narrative of who Brian O'Nolan was in the two target cultures and opens more space for recognition of his other literary personas in the Czech context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Flann O'Brien's At Swim-Two-Birds, a postmodernist novel avant la lettre, literary entities rewrite literary texts, including those in which they exist and I argue that they do so through metaleptic rewriting and in pursuit of different types of authorial justice, all of which are infelicitous. The novel's intense self-reflexivity and intricate metafictional games create a foundation that is too fluid to sustain the weight of a heavy concept such as justice. Thus, myriad fictional worlds filled with authors wishing to impose what they deem to be fair in their own literary universe interact, intersect and overlap, allowing their justice-motivated characters to metaleptically transgress their ontological levels in order to undo the wrongs of their authors. Yet, in a novel that promotes itself as 'a self-evident sham', such attempts are mocked at every step and the quest for fairness is replaced by the thirst for authorial power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A memoir of the Irish scholar John Wyse Jackson, who was a crucial pioneer in Flann O'Brien studies.

In 1959–60 Brian O’Nolan republished about sixty Cruiskeen Lawn columns in four numbers of a short-lived periodical which was called Nonplus, edited by Patricia Avis. The republished columns are predominantly complex and multilingual satirical sallies into heavyweight topics: aesthetics, language, literature, politics, and the national culture. Some of this reprinted Nonplus material had already been published not once, but twice. This repetition creates unusual effects. This note explores a recursive 'loop-hole' O'Nolan creates by reprinting a column first published in 1946 and republished in an edited form in 1958.

James Fraser reports from Palimpsests: V International Flann O'Brien Conference (University College Dublin, 16–19 July 2019)

This essay addresses a relatively untouched topic in the field of Brian O'Nolan / Flann O'Brien studies: the Irish-language "Tales from Corkadorky" vignettes published during 1941-42 in the "Cruiskeen Lawn" column O'Nolan wrote as Myles na gCopaleen for the Irish Times. This essay builds on the brief existing critical remarks about this series of columns by exploring, in unprecedented detail, Breandán Ó Conaire's suggestion that the "Tales from Corkadorky" are modelled on the Sgéalta Mhuintir Luinigh (Munterloney Folktales) collected by Professor Éamonn Ó Tuathail and published in 1933. After summarising existing criticism, the essay presents the wider context of folklore collection for O'Nolan's work in Irish, the background linking him to Ó Tuathail's Sgéalta Mhuintir Luinigh, and proceeds to conduct a comparative reading of O'Nolan's use of dialect features and themes from this source material in the "Tales from Corkadorky". Facilitated by its analysis of the first tale to appear, the essay traces the origin and development of the tale format as it interacts with other recurring elements in "Cruiskeen Lawn". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the extent to which Flann O'Brien's early fiction can be read as 'representing' the cultural realities of post-independence Ireland. The rise of the new modernist studies has inspired a host of criticism to explain the Flann O'Brien oeuvre in terms of the cultural dynamics from which it 'emerges'. The early novels, however, given their radically symbolic character – and the particular manner in which they efface memory – are obtuse in relation to (the representation of) Ireland. Through a close reading of their respective narrative modes, it is argued that Ireland is an absent presence which lacks constitutive meaning in At Swim-Two-Birds and The Third Policeman and is thus supplemented by their fictional realities. As such, this article (re)considers the critical criteria for thinking about Irish modernist literature in relation to the history of the nation state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In fictional texts, personal names (and more generally proper nouns) are considered to be meaningful linguistic and cultural items since they often convey specific connotations to a literary text, and they constitute a challenge for translators since they are usually used to define the character itself, often from an ironic perspective. Translators can adopt different strategies (copy; naturalization; transcription; addition; phonological replacement; re-creation; cultural transplantation) but, as it often happens in translation, a significant part of specific connotations of the name is usually lost. Flann O’Brien resorts to a “creative” use of proper names, often comments them (De Selby, one of his characters, claims “to be in a position to state the physiological ‘group’ of any person merely from a brief study of the letters of his name”). This study analyses O’Brien’s use of proper nouns and the several solutions adopted by translators of his novels and short stories, suggesting some possible alternatives and highlighting the semantic potential of the examined proper names which is inevitably lost.

The Enlightenment idea of Bildung (education, acculturation) rests primarily on dialogue, i.e. on the presumption that the self can communicate with the other. The traditional European Bildungsroman, therefore, typically concentrates on the formation of the protagonist who, through language and recognition, will eventually achieve self-realization as well as social integration. In his much-underrated novel The Hard Life, Flann O'Brien playfully engages with the conventions of the classical Bildungsroman and deliberately challenges its narrative structure as well as its major assumption that language lies at the heart of the protagonist's process of acculturation. In addition to the loosely linked scenes with no promise of teleological development, the central dialogues of the novel also point to the impossibility of dialectical movement that would eventually lead to the attainment of an ultimate meaning. Focusing mainly on the Collopy-Father Fahrt dialogues, this paper suggests that, in addition to enhancing the comic quality of this mock-Bildungsroman, the prevalence of pedantic wordplay and/or overblown rhetoric in The Hard Life questions the function of language as the medium of communication as well as the most fundamental human activity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay develops recent critical discussions of Brian O'Nolan's short-lived comic periodical, Blather, by further contextualizing the magazine amidst the popular and avant-garde print culture of its period. First, I undertake a detailed comparison of Blather with the English comic periodical Razzle, revealing the features which are lifted directly from this model and exploring the significance of Razzle's use of metaleptic humour for O'Nolan's work more widely. Subsequently, I place Blather in the context of the publications and activities of the Berlin Dadaists and specifically their magazine Der Dada. I propose three characteristics it shares with Blather: what I term the 'extended identity trope'; the subversion of popular culture with photomontage techniques; and an engagement with the creative possibilities of advertising. In conclusion, I propose that these contexts shed light on the cohabitation of modernist experimentation and a popular orientation which characterises Blather and O'Nolan's wider literary project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A world-ecological perspective of cultural production refuses a dualist conception of nature and society – which imagines nature as an external site of static outputs  – and instead foregrounds the fact that human and extra-human natures are completely intertwined. This essay seeks to reinterpret the satirical writing of a canonical figure within the Irish literary tradition, Brian O'Nolan, in light of the energy history of Ireland, understood as co-produced by both human actors and biophysical nature. How does the energy imaginary of O'Nolan's work refract and mediate the Irish environment and the socio-ecological relations shaping the fuel supply-chains that power the Irish energy regime dominant under the Irish Free State? I discuss the relationship between peat as fuel and Brian O'Nolan's pseudonymous newspaper columns, and indicate how questions about energy regimes and ecology can lead us to read his Irish language novel An Béal Bocht [The Poor Mouth] (1941) in a new light. The moments I select and analyze from O'Nolan's output feature a kind of satire that exposes the folly of separating society from nature, by presenting an exaggerated form of the myth of nature as an infinite resource. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the greatest challenges presented by the writings of Flann O’Brien is how to place them. For some he is the peer of Joyce and Beckett; for others his work is modernist pastiche; still others regard him as a reactionary satirist; while for another group he is the forerunner of American postmodernism. His work is often loosely labelled “surreal” or “absurd.” Yet O’Brien’s work is rarely read as avant-garde per se. This essay attempts to gain a new understanding of his oeuvre by reading a particular sliver of it – his manifestos – in the context of the historical avant-garde in Europe. Like many writers of his generation and the one previous, O’Brien wrote manifestos. One example is the founding editorial of the “anti-magazine” Blather (1934), whose “sardonic laugh” echoes the manifestos – or “anti-manifestos” – of Vorticism and Dada. The manifesto of intertextuality in At Swim-Two-Birds (1939), meanwhile, is more complex: while it appears to be in some ways a sincere statement about the novel as a whole, it is also intensely ironic and self-mocking. But that only deepens its relation to the manifestos of the preceding decades, which frequently undercut their own purpose in the midst of their performance.

Yaeli Greenblatt reports from Acting Out: IV International Flann O’Brien Conference (Salzburg University, 17–21 July 2017)

Pádraig Ó Méaloid proposes Francis Sylvester Mahony's alter-ego Father Prout as a potential model for the character of Father Kurt Fahrt, S.J., in Flann O'Brien's The Hard Life.

El presente artículo analiza cómo la transgresión de fronteras característica de lo fantástico se origina en At Swim-Two-Birdsde Flann O’Brien a través de la metalepsis, figura retórica que acciona el resorte fantástico, desestabilizando la frontera entre la realidad y la ficción y generando una inquietud en el lector en la medida en que este se ve forzado a interrogarse sobre los límites de lo real y el estatus ontológico del autor y los personajes, así como su propio estatus. Asimismo, se hace hincapié en la instancia metafictiva y paródica de la novela en tanto que, como elementos constitutivos de At Swim-Two-Birds, tienen en común la transgresión de fronteras.

This paper examines the stylometric similarities between James Joyce and Flann O’Brien, demonstrating which works from the latter’s oeuvre are stylistically the most Joycean. We will outline the results of a series of quantitative enquiries focused specifically on Joyce and O’Brien, before offering a number of literary interpretations. It has long been argued that Brian O’Nolan, operating under the pseudonym of Flann O’Brien, is a disciple of James Joyce. This relationship remains a concern for scholars, and so our purpose here is to contribute some computational evidence to the discussion. We pinpoint those exact moments where O’Brien’s style is quantitatively similar to that of Joyce, using our results to re-engage existing arguments with renewed statistical precision.

Flann O’Brien (1911-1966) began his career as a novelist in 1939 with the publication of At Swim-Two-Birds. Since then, his first novel has generally been considered by far his finest work. In 1940, O’Brien’s second novel, The Third Policeman, was rejected by several publishers and O’Brien temporally ceased to write novels. He devoted twenty-one years to writing his long-running newspaper column Cruiskeen Lawn, apart from several theatre and TV plays. In 1961 he began to write novels again with the publication of The Hard Life and three years later, in 1964, he published The Dalkey Archive. Although his last two novels enjoyed positive reception, for many years critics and audience alike have thought that they could not be compared to At Swim-Two-Birds. It has been argued that O’Brien started to lose his creativity as a writer from the 1940s onwards due to a number of reasons. This article aims at assessing the question of creativity in Flann O’Brien and at trying to provide some answers by looking at several external and personal circumstances in his career as a writer.

Brian O'Nolan wrote in English and Gaelic under different pseudonyms, Flann O'Brien for his English novels and Myles na gCopaleen for his work in Gaelic. While O'Brien is considered a master of Postmodernist literature, the work written under the Gaelic pen name, eminently satiric, remained that of an obscure author in a minority language. It was just one more authorial identity among many created by O'Nolan. This complexity of authorial personae did not get through the translations into Spanish until O'Brien was characterised as a great canonical English-language author. I apply Casanova's model of translation as unequal exchange to describe how the literary capital of O'Brien brought attention to his Gaelic-language counterpart and helped to consecrate him when translated into Spanish. To that end, I compare the paratextual material in the first edition (with no introduction) and the second edition (on a literary collection with an informative introduction and laudatory paratexts by reputed authors) of the same translation of An Béal Bocht to show how the characterisation of O'Brien as a great English-language writer in the period between one edition and the other allowed the translator to introduce na gCopaleen and Gaelic to the Spanish readership in the second edition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At Swim-Two-Birds, la primera novela de Flann O'Brien publicada en 1939, ha sido generalmente considerada como la obra maestra de Flann O'Brien debido a su narración espontánea y su estilo experimental. Sin embargo, sus orígenes y proceso de composición no han sido analizados en profundidad. Este artículo examina los orígenes de At Swim-Two-Birds mediante un análisis de la producción literaria de O'Brien anterior a su primera novela, buscando conexiones entre la novela y los primeros escritos de O'Brien. El objetivo de este artículo es demostrar que las ideas y contenidos de At Swim-Two-Birds habían estado ya presentes en la mente de O'Brien mucho antes de que comenzase a escribir su primera novela