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. 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. Despite, or perhaps because of, being written in halting English, Eibhlís’ letters have an intense, poetic appeal, becoming increasingly elegiac in tone as she records and laments the relentless decline of the Island’s population.īesides the correspondence with George Chambers, she kept a diary in Irish over the years, making many detailed observations about the social life of the Islanders.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 The letters are unique in the context of Blasket literature, not least for being written in English, very much a second language for Eibhlís. The letters span her early adult life on the Island and the first decade of her life on the mainland, to which she moved with her family in 1942. The selection draws on the lengthy correspondence Eibhlís maintained with an English visitor to the Island, George Chambers, between 19. In 1950 he was drowned while swimming near Galway.Ĭhiefly remembered as the author of a remarkable series of letters, a selection of which was published as Letters from the Great Blasket (1978). The book’s success encouraged Muiris to take up writing full-time, but a second volume of autobiography and a novel were rejected by successive publishers. The English translation, published the same year by Thomson and Moya Llewellyn Davies, quickly established it as an international classic of autobiographical writing. The result, Twenty Years a-Growing, was acclaimed nationally on its publication in 1933. It was the success of Tomás Ó Criomhthain’s autobiographical book The Islandman, combined with the encouragement of his friend George Thomson, that prompted Muiris to undertake his own account of his formative years on the Blaskets. He was greatly aided in this by his grandfather, Eoghan (Daideo) Ó Súilleabháin, a gifted storyteller who developed a great affection for the boy. When he rejoined his family on the Island he spoke only English, but quickly became fluent in Irish. But he steadily improved his writing abilities until he was able to produce his two best known works Allagar na hInise (1928), and An tOileánach (1929), in his own hand.Īs works of high literary merit coming out of an oral culture, they are triumphs of determination to master the written word – to leave a record, as he wrote in the closing lines of An tOileánach, ‘of what life was like in my time and the neighbours that lived with me’.įollowing the death of his mother, Muiris spent the first six years of his life in Dingle. His first major book, Seanchas ón Oileán Tiar, published in 1956, was dictated to Robin Flower. He received great encouragement from the scholars Carl Marstrander and Robin Flower and later as editors from Brian Ó Ceallaigh and Pádraig Ó Siochfhradha. Having been taught to write only English in school, he was faced in his middle years with the challenge of learning to write in his native Irish in order to record the life and history of his people. A farmer and fisherman, he lived all his life on the Island. Perhaps the greatest of the Island writers.
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