Peig: The Autobiography of Peig Sayers of the Great Blasket Island 1983 PB Good

Criterion Press, 1983. Trade paperback of Peig: The Autobiography of Peig Sayers of the Great Blasket Island by Peig Sayers, translated by Bryan MacMahon.

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 the 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 Tomas, 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.

Good condition. Previous owner gift inscription and markings to the half-title page. Solid book with shelf wear.