The Dirty Dust: Cre na Cille

ISBN: 9780300198492 Title: The Dirty Dust: Cré na Cille (The Margellos World Republic of Letters) by Ó Cadhain, Máirtín Publisher: Yale University Press, 2015 Binding: Hardcover Condition: Fine Edition: 1st Edition The 2015 English-language translation of O Cadhain's raucous masterpiece Cré na Cille. Mairtin O Cadhain's irresistible and infamous novel The Dirty Dust is consistently ranked as the most important prose work in modern Irish, yet no translation for English-language readers had been published. Alan Titley's vigorous translation, full of the brio and guts of Ó Cadhain's original, at last brings the pleasures of this great satiric novel to the far wider audience it deserves. In The Dirty Dust all characters lie dead in their graves. This, however, does not impair their banter or their appetite for news of aboveground happenings from the recently arrived. Told entirely in dialogue, Ó Cadhain's daring novel listens in on the gossip, rumors, backbiting, complaining, and obsessing of the local community. In the afterlife, it seems, the same old life goes on beneath the sod. Only nothing can be done about it-apart from talk. In this merciless yet comical portrayal of a closely bound community, Ó Cadhain remains keenly attuned to the absurdity of human behavior, the lilt of Irish gab, and the nasty, deceptive magic of human connection.