Seosamh Mac Grianna, born in Rann na Feirste, County Donegal in 1900, was one of the most important writers in Irish of his generation. His biographical novel, Mo bhealach féin, was written in the 1930s and published in 1940. This translation by Mícheál Ó hAodha makes the book available in English for the first time.

Mac Grianna was able to escape the tough life of seasonal labouring that was the norm in west Donegal by winning scholarships to support his education. Following a short spell as a schoolteacher, in the late 1920s and early 1930s he worked as a translator for the Irish state publisher, An Gúm. His work rate was astonishing ― according to the Dictionary of Irish biography, he translated 29,000 words of Ivanhoe in a single week and contributed around a million words to the press's output. However, in This road of mine, the writer recalls this as a time of creative crisis, for he found himself ‘working with literature the same way another man cuts timber or collects sawdust’ (p. 5). This internal crisis launches the narrative with a raw self-reflexiveness that lays bare Mac Grianna's quarrel with An Gúm and his assessment of the period as a bleak one for independent artists. The stifling socio-cultural context, as he saw it, of 1930s Ireland influenced his decision to quit translation work and led him into near poverty, working a range of casual jobs including a brief spell as a fortune teller. Mac Grianna's opportunism and resourcefulness provides a glimpse into life on the margins of Dublin society during the economic depression of the period.

A tramp through Wales is the focal point of the book, a period of personal recovery and transformation. On receipt of an unexpected payment, Mac Grianna travelled to Wales to indulge his interest in the language. After five months in Cardiff ― where he became acquainted with African American activist Marcus Garvey's civil rights movement ― he decided to walk to Scotland, vowing to travel only by foot and sleep only outdoors (on the second day, the physical and mental challenges presented by this quest led him to picture himself perishing alone on a hillside). In ways, This road of mine pre-empts the American road novel exemplified by Kerouac and the beat generation almost two decades later, with its emphasis on chance encounters, its deep self-reflexivity and extreme subjectivity, the writer's (self-imposed) poverty, and his quest to reignite his dormant creativity through immersion in wild places.

Mac Grianna's tramp through Wales can also be situated in a long tradition of travel writing about the country. It became a destination for pedestrian travellers from the mid-eighteenth century and was given iconic status by the Romantic poets, while the philosophical importance of walking was elucidated in Welsh resident John Thelwall's 1793 treatise, The peripatetic. Mac Grianna's memoir contains none of Romanticism's rhapsodising about the sublime landscape but retains the search for solitude ubiquitous in accounts of Wales throughout the modern period. His short trek presented unexpected physical challenges, but the rural isolation ― reminiscent of his childhood home in west Donegal ― was essential to his creative process and his mental health. Indeed, Mac Grianna's mental health is a recurring theme throughout the book, referenced with frankness and presaging the mental ill-health that saw him spend the last three decades of his life in an institution.

This autobiographical novel unfortunately does not describe Mac Grianna's role as a propagandist for the I.R.A. during the War of Independence, or his period of internment in Newbridge camp in 1922 and 1923. His disappointment with the shape of independent Ireland is evident throughout the book, particularly in terms of the status of the arts and the grinding poverty experienced by so many. The book is also playful and ludicrous in places, such as his failed attempt to row across the Irish Sea in a stolen boat with a useless companion. The rich patchwork of Mac Grianna's writing is suffused with the Gaelic literary and poetic traditions that were fundamental to his upbringing in Rann na Feirste, references that are helpfully and knowledgably glossed by the translator. It is to be celebrated that this text is finally available to a wider audience.