Further Details

Title: Peig
Condition: New
Subtitle: The Autobiography of Peig Sayers of the Great Blasket Island
Author: Peig Sayers
Translator: Bryan MacMahon
Contributor: Bryan MacMahon (Translated by)
Format: Paperback
EAN: 9780815602583
ISBN: 9780815602583
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
Genre: Biography
Release Date: 10/01/1974
Description: 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.

Here is a story as unforgettable as it is simple. 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. 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. . . . 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 died in 1958, when she was 85. 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.

Through this American edition, Peig will reach a new international audience. 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.
Language: English
Country/Region of Manufacture: US
Item Height: 203mm
Item Length: 140mm
Item Weight: 249g
Series: Irish Studies
Release Year: 1974

Missing Information?

Please contact us if any details are missing and where possible we will add the information to our listing.