For almost 70 years, Máirtín Ó Cadhain’s début novel remained untranslated into English.
In 1948, the Irish-language writer Máirtín Ó Cadhain received the kind of rejection letter a novelist might dream of getting. He had submitted his foul-mouthed first novel, “Cré na Cille” , to his publisher, only to see it denied on the ground that it was too “Joycean.” This wasn’t meant as a compliment: it was the prudish publisher’s way of calling the book bawdy. A furious Ó Cadhain took the novel elsewhere.
Today, “Cré na Cille” is considered Joycean in a less euphemistic sense. A dust-jacket blurb from Colm Tóibín declares it “the greatest novel to be written in the Irish language, and among the best books to come out of Ireland in the twentieth century.” Scholars of Irish writing have hailed it as “a masterpiece” and “one of the most outstanding works in contemporary European literature.” “No superlatives can exaggerate its importance,” one early reviewer declared.
But for almost seventy years, Ó Cadhain’s greatest work remained inaccessible to nearly all Irish readers, because it was written in Irish Gaelic, a language vanishingly few of them speak, and it had never been translated into English. As if in overcorrection of this historical lapse, Yale University Press, together with the Irish-language publishing house Cló Iar-Chonnacht, has now put out not one but two English translations.
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