Peig: The Autobiography Of Peig Sayers Of The Great Blasket Island

Here, translated into English for the first time, is the autobiography of Peig Sayers, that remarkable woman who, born in a remote townland on the coast of County Kerry and at the most westerly point in Europe, married a Blasket Islander and subsequently lived on the Island for forty years.
This narrative on its publication in Irish won a large and appreciative audience and became one of the great classics of modern Gaelic literature. Here is unfolded a tale as indelible as it is simple: it reveals with fidelity, humour and poignancy, the responses of a sensitive woman to a rigorous and even fearsome environment one in which she was always in touch with the primal forces of nature. Peig tells of the night her match was made: 'I was peeping from under my eyelashes at the young men, and I couldn't decide which of the three was asking for me,' and again of the death of her son, Tomas, who had fallen from a clifftop, she says, '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.' Of her it has been said that if all the great legends of Ireland had been lost, she could have replaced most of them out of the vast store she had committed to memory.
Buried on a clifftop above the sea, a short distance from the townland in which she was born and within sight of the Great Blasket Island, her farewell to life is most moving: '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.'
Through this translation it is certain that PEIG will reach a new international audience. Long revered and loved in Ireland this autobiography will now be seen for what it truly is one of the great heart-cries of the Irish people.