8/28/2023 0 Comments Peig sayers autobiography"Flann O'Brien & Modernism": Book Review."National Geographic Traveller: Ireland": Book Review.Maeve Binchy's "Maeve's Times": Book Review.Gerard Cappa's "Black Boat Dancing": Book Review.Mark Cunningham: "Horslips: Tall Tales": Book Review.Peter Somerville-Large's "Irish Voices": Book Review.Máirtín Ó Cadhain's "The Dirty Dust": Book Review.Eric Cross' "The Tailor and Ansty": Book Review.It's not the most gripping account, but visitors to these shores today may give it a go. This may or may not be a strength for today's audiences, but the value of this historical record remains. Bryan MacMahon's translation came too late for many a cribbing child's lessons, but it conveys the air of the Irish for we English-speaking readers. These tales, a century later, are frankly not that arresting. The frequency of these woes has led to Flann O'Brian's parody translated as The Poor Mouth by Myles na gCopaleen, to the detriment of this original inspiration. The last third or so of the narrative, as with many a teller's life, is more weighted down by sorrow and lament. Most of this book are stories, naturally, told by her, with frequent invocations to the holy presences that once filled many an Irish person's mind and mouth, whether they knew the Irish or had given over to the English tongue.Īfter marriage takes her across the strait to the Blasket Island home where she raises a family, the years compress. What surprised me was how much of her autobiography took place in her youth, not only in Dun Chaoin but in her Irish-speaking schooldays in the family's new residence An Ceann Trá (Ventry) nearer to Dingle, where she went to work for a household while in her teens. Her book and that of her son are still in print and in local shops, and surely the study of the Blaskets accounts for the bulk of local commemoration, or the scholarship given to her memoir and those of her fellow islanders. ![]() I noted when travelling around the Dingle area and her 1873 birthplace that nothing I could see revealed Péig Sayers' presence, although my stay there was too brief, and half at night, to allow me to investigate further. Its prescribed reading for generations of schoolchildren subjected to compulsory Irish has weakened its reputation. As Eoin McKiernan, President of the Irish American Cultural Institute, notes in his introduction, Peig has the “quality of honesty and sincerity, of life lived at the bone.” Long loved in Ireland, this autobiography will now be seen for what it truly is-one of the great heart-cries of the Irish people.While this well-known account has sat on my shelf for decades, I read this only after staying in the author's native village of Dun Chaoin (Dunquin) in the West Kerry/Corca Dhuibhne Gaeltacht. Through this American edition, Peig will reach a new international audience. She is buried a short distance from the townland where she was born, above the sea on the Dingle Peninsula, within sight of the Great Blasket Island. laid out as expertly and as calmly as if twelve women had tended him.” Her own farewell to life had the same clear-eyed simplicity: “People will yet walk into the graveyard where I’ll be lying I’ll be stretched out quietly and the old world will have vanished.” ![]() Peig said of her son Tomás, who was killed in a fall from a clifftop: “Instead of his body being out in the broad ocean, there he was on the smooth detached stone. It reveals with fidelity, humor, and poignancy a woman’s life in a bleak world where survival itself was a triumph and death as familiar as life. Here is a story as unforgettable as it is simple. Here is one of the classics of modern Gaelic literature-the autobiography of Peig Sayers, a remarkable woman who lived forty years at the edge of survival on barren Great Blasket Island, and who came to be recognized as one of the last of Ireland’s traditional storytellers.
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