Novelist, folklorist, university lecturer, balladeer, and poet he has had three of his plays produced by the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, and his fiction has received critical acclaim and wide translation. 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.īryan MacMahon, a fluent Irish speaker, looked on this translation of Peig as a labor of love. Through this American edition, Peig will reach a new international audience. Peig was, he said, one of the hidden souls of Ireland seldom shown to the stranger and recalled how her voice settled in the depths of his soul, ‘more beautiful than I can describe. 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. Wandering bard, Eoghan Roe Ward, left a touching snapshot of Peig Sayers in her twilight years when he visited her in her home in Vicarstown, Dunquin, in 1944. 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. On that occasion, one of the stories Anna chose to tell was that of a lazy.

Here is a story as unforgettable as it is simple. Patricia Coughlans feminist readings of Peig Sayers autobiographical texts. 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.

Peig sayers storie annotations