Graveyard Clay/Cré na Cille
Máirtín Ó Cadhain; Translated from the Irish by Liam Mac Con Iomaire and Tim Robinson

The Dirty Dust/Cré na Cille
Máirtín Ó Cadhain; translated from the Irish by Alan Titley

An odd thing indeed: one novel; one publisher; two translations. Yale University Press published The Dirty Dust last year. It was the first translation into English of Máirtín Ó Cadhain’s greatly admired novel, Cré na Cille, a work of tremendous imagination and intimacy set among the dead in a country graveyard. Here they continue to talk, gossip and bitch about those up above and those with whom they now shared the dust below. To the ­initiated, Cré na Cille has been regarded since its publication in 1950 as a modernist masterpiece.

Yet no sooner has one got used to the ­surprise of finding one of the classics of Irish-language literature in English, than a second translation, Graveyard Clay, also appears. It is far from second translations that we were reared!

The novel and Ó Cadhain himself have long had iconic status among Irish speakers. As translators Liam Mac Con Iomaire and Tim Robinson note in their fine introduction to Graveyard Clay, Ó Cadhain was “a formidable controversialist and satirist”.