Book 0178
Graveyard Clay / Cré na Cille by Máirtín Ó Cadhain Translated by Liam Mac Con Iomaire and Tim Robinson
Donated by Conor, who says...
Set among the lively dead, this book is the final, greatest, record of a way of life now gone: life in the West of Ireland in times past.
This life, the life described in this book, in all its misery, its glory, its preoccupation with place, past and passion, was dying, or was just dead and still being keened, when I was born in 1972 and my childhood was informed by a sense that something ancient, atrocious, rich and personal to our lives was passing, or had just past.
Perhaps all child have this elegiac feeling for the world that preceded their birth, but we are lucky to have this record of this particular world, written in Irish and translated into sort of English that Irish pokes through.