Peig Sayers in happier times
Further to recent neo-Gaelgoir revisionism.
A case for the ultimate Blasket case.
Author Sarah Baume writes:
It doesn’t matter to me that she didn’t place her own words down on paper, for this is only one element in the process of writing. Elegant prose it isn’t, but there are few authors with a more authentically Irish voice. Though much of what she described was unrelenting hardship, she was, by all accounts, pragmatic and cheerful in the face of it. Peig Sayers spoke for generations of poor, uneducated Irish women who never had the opportunity to speak for themselves….
TROID!
In praise of Peig Sayers, by Sara Baume (IrishTimes)
Go raibh maith agat Ultach
It was her son Leo I had no time for.
…labhair sé go mór de túsa…
TROID?
Troid tine le tine, is é an deireadh in aice !
\m/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNnAvTTaJjM
If you want to learn Irish, stay away from this book. There’s more to it than inherited misery.
Probably best to learn Irish before attempting to read it in the original, but yes, it’s probably best to have other reasons to learn it before you start out. Sarah quotes from the English translation in her article which is worth a look (if you’re interested).
In one way or another, life was passing us by & we were suffering misery, sometimes having a potato and at other times having nothing in our mouths but sweet words of Gaelic. As far as the weather in itself was concerned, things were becoming worse.
Is that from Myles’s The Poor Mouth?
I believe so. Great fun. It was the first “proper” book I ever read in Irish.
Stupid people never get the importance of her story being recorded for history.
Clearly you have inherited her hardon for misery.
It doesn’t matter whether she had a hard-on for misery or whether we have inherited it, or whether her writing was wonderful or dire, hers was an incredibly important story to be told. That life doesn’t exist anymore, and any understanding of the social history of that part of Ireland would be immeasurably poorer without her account. Yes, it was awful having to trudge through it in school (I would imagine, I missed that by a few years) and there is no way that such an account should have been drilled in to Irish school goers for so many years, but as a historical document, her story is priceless.
+ Aontaím leis an tuairim seo thuas.
Brian O’Donnell is the Peig of today ;)