Had I known in advance half, or even one-third of what the future had in store for me, my heart wouldn't have been as gay or as courageous as it was in the beginning of my days." The opening doleful lines of her 1936 book, as dictated to her son, Maidhc, read: "I'm an old woman now with one foot in the grave and the other on its edge. Peig,was enough to induce despair and anguish in the hearts of many Leaving Cert students. The version of Peig depicted in her autobiography, Peig was the headline act on the Irish curriculum throughout the 1960s and 1970s, until she became the butt of jokes and a figure of ridicule. "It's a rehabilitation of Peig," says Malachy Moran, RTÉ Radio's manager of audio services and archives. It presents a fresher, earthier version of Peig, where her sense of fun and warmth come to the fore.
PEIG FULL TEXT ARCHIVE
The Blasket Islander is to be re-introduced to the public through a series of lectures and broadcasts throughout the next week.Ī new online archive exhibition has been launched on RTÉ's website using rare recordings of Peig made by Séamus Ennis and Seán Mac Reamoinn in 1947. PEIG SAYERS, the great storyteller who died 50 years ago on Monday, and who was the scourge and torment of Leaving Cert students for decades, is undergoing a makeover. Peig’s story is one of long-suffering throughout her life.Peig Sayers was long the bane of Irish secondary-school students, but now, on the 50th anniversary of her death, the great Blasket Island storyteller is undergoing something of a reappraisal, writes She recounts many adversities from the interruption of her wedding day by the death of her niece, to the tragic death of her own son as a teenager. Yet I think it is striking to think about the general perception of Peig, exemplified in my mother, when we look at her. There is a particular generation of Irish people whose knowledge of Peig Sayers does not extend past that of my mothers.
PEIG FULL TEXT FULL
They consider Peig’s story bleak and miserable and full of hardship however, in her lifetime Peig was anything but boring to those around her. Peig was a storyteller of epic proportions to those of the Great Blasket community, renowned for her magnificent repertoire of European folk tales and Irish hero legends.
PEIG FULL TEXT MANUAL
Born on the mainland Peig left school at thirteen to work as a manual labourer. When her brother found her a match Peig took the opportunity to make her own home. She married Pádraig Ó Gaoithín and moved to the Great Blasket island with him. It’s crucial to contextualise how we came to have Peig’s autobiographies.
During the literary and cultural revival many Blasket Islanders were encouraged by scholars and activists to write down and document their lives. One of the reasons the Blasket island texts became so important was because the islanders were seen as entirely separated from the mainland Ireland, with all its anglicisation and industrialisation. Peig enlisted her son Mike to transcribe her life’s stories as she could neither read nor write in Irish. When encountering texts that have been translated it is essential to consider them a form of re-writing. Ttranslation almost always involves a renegotiation and ‘re’ or ‘mis’ representation of the original text. It causes a linguistic and cultural clash that cannot always be resolved and raises questions of re-appropriation and remaking – how much liberty can the translator take while still maintaining the integrity of the original? This is especially relevant when looking at Peig’s texts, as from the viewpoint of revivalists, these texts were intended to reawaken and revitalise the Irish language.Īll that to say, the Blasket Island books, when written were seen as representing the peasant narrative of Ireland – this gave them a cultural and aesthetic ‘Irishness’ that reproduced adeeply authentic narrative in the eyes of many revivalists scholars. They were instrumentalized in guarding and perpetuating the Irish language in the face of anglicisation and reclaiming the indigenousness of Irish people.
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