When encountering texts that have been translated it is essential to consider them a form of re-writing. Peig enlisted her son Mike to transcribe her life’s stories as she could neither read nor write in Irish. One of the reasons the Blasket island texts became so important was because the islanders were seen as entirely separated from the mainland Ireland, with all its anglicisation and industrialisation. During the literary and cultural revival many Blasket Islanders were encouraged by scholars and activists to write down and document their lives. It’s crucial to contextualise how we came to have Peig’s autobiographies. She married Pádraig Ó Gaoithín and moved to the Great Blasket island with him. When her brother found her a match Peig took the opportunity to make her own home. Born on the mainland Peig left school at thirteen to work as a manual labourer. Peig was a storyteller of epic proportions to those of the Great Blasket community, renowned for her magnificent repertoire of European folk tales and Irish hero legends. They consider Peig’s story bleak and miserable and full of hardship however, in her lifetime Peig was anything but boring to those around her. There is a particular generation of Irish people whose knowledge of Peig Sayers does not extend past that of my mothers. Yet I think it is striking to think about the general perception of Peig, exemplified in my mother, when we look at her. She recounts many adversities from the interruption of her wedding day by the death of her niece, to the tragic death of her own son as a teenager. Peig’s story is one of long-suffering throughout her life. Yet that knowledge never stopped my Mother asking me, as if she were hoping we could bond over a mutual trauma. I never did study Peig Sayers in school – it was removed from the course long before then. Being a typical Leaving Cert student my mother could not recall anything in the slightest about Peig except that it was a deeply boring and depressing text. The first time I heard of Peig Sayers was from my mother, who, for every year of my secondary school would inquiringly ask me whether I was studying Peigs Sayers.
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