One Moonlit Night

Poet-journalist Prichard (1904-1980) was born in the slate-quarrying town of Bethesda, in northwest Wales. His father died when he was five months old, and, when he was a teenager, Prichard took his mother to the Denbigh Mental Hospital. He left Bethesda to become a journalist, first at Caernarfon, then in Cardiff and finally, in 1936, in London, where he would remain until his death. In 1955, hard on the heels of Dylan Thomas's ""radio play for voices"" Under Milk Wood, Prichard started to write One Moonlit Night, planning a radio drama but eventually expanding it into a novel, first published in 1961 in the original Welsh. Narrated in the first person, Prichard's autobiographical portrait of a boy and his friends coming of age in a small Welsh village is set against a sprawling, shadowy tapestry of larger events-the unsuccessful 1900-1903 strike of Bethesda quarrymen, the 1904- 1905 quasi-religious revivals in Wales and WWI deprivations. At the core is the boy's relationship with his depressed, distraught mother and his empathy for her. Play outside might bring blood from a rock hidden in a snowball, but he sees such as only one minor event in his splintering, collapsing community. A sensitive soul rubbed raw, the boy recounts a turbulent flow of imaginative visions, anguish, death, madness, funerals and ""the solitude of the night."" Mitchell does a fine job of bringing Prichard's simple, lyrical prose to English and further helps readers of this first complete translation by providing a glossary of place names and notes on Welsh expletives and nicknames.(Feb.)