The Dirty Dust

by Máirtín Ó Cadhain

  The Dirty Dust

  The Dirty Dust:

  Cré na Cille

  MÁIRTÍN Ó CADHAIN

  TRANSLATED FROM THE IRISH BY ALAN TITLEY

  The Margellos World Republic of Letters is dedicated to making literary works from around the globe available in English through translation. It brings to the English-speaking world the work of leading poets, novelists, essayists, philosophers, and playwrights from Europe, Latin America, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East to stimulate international discourse and creative exchange.

  English translation copyright © 2015 by Yale University and Clo Iar-Chonnacht. Originally published in Irish as Cré na Cille. Copyright © 1949 by Sáirseál agus Dill.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Ó Cadhain, Máirtín.

  [Cré na cille. English]

  The dirty dust : cré na cille / Máirtín Ó Cadhain ; Translated from Irish by Alan Titley.

  pages cm.—(The Margellos World Republic of Letters)

  “Originally published in Irish as Cré na Cille. Copyright © 1949 by Sáirseál agus Dill.”

  ISBN 978-0-300-19849-2 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Ireland—Fiction. 2. Cemeteries—Fiction. I. Titley, Alan, translator. II. Title.

  PB1399.028C7413 2015

  891.6′2343—dc23

  2014034533

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  CONTENTS

  Translator’s Introduction

  List of Characters and Dialogue Conventions

  The Dirty Dust

  TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION

  In The Dirty Dust everyone is dead. This may seem an unlikely way to write a novel, but Máirtín Ó Cadhain* was not your usual author. He was both traditional and experimental as he willed, and the device he chose for this novel suited his own genius and the community he was depicting.

  The characters in the novel may be dead, and lying down in their graves, but they do not shut up. It is the fact that the dead do not shut up that gives life to the novel. The novel is composed entirely of heard and of unheard conversation, apart from the introductions to some of the chapters (which are called interludes) that are spoken by the Trumpet of the Graveyard and act as a kind of a linguistic and philosophical contrast to what is going on below. What is going on below is a continuation of what was going on above before all the residents of the cemetery died. It is a novel that is a listening-in to gossip and to backbiting and rumours and bitching and carping and moaning and obsessing about the most important, but more often the most trivial, matters of life, which are often the same thing. It is as if, in an afterlife beneath the sods, the same old life would go on, only nothing could be done about it, apart from talk.

  And talk is the principal character in this novel. Although the introductory pages of the novel say that the time is eternity, which is understandable, in fact, the locus of the novel is a graveyard somewhere in Connemara in the west of Ireland in the early 1940s. In that Connemara of the thirties and the forties there was no radio, except in the priest’s and the teacher’s houses; there was no cinema and few shops, and television had never been heard of.

  The only culture was talk.

  There were songs and music and some dancing, but talk was the centerpiece of creativity. This novel attempts to capture the talk and the never-ending gabble and gossip of which the community was made. It might be said that all human communities before the onset of common literacy were simply made of talk. While anthropologists tell us that there are “loquacious” communities and “reticent” ones, there is no doubt whatsoever into which of those boxes Ireland fell. In that sense of never-ending chatter this novel is a better reflection of the concerns of ordinary humanity over thousands of years than those which deal with the great and the good. These concerns are not always that pleasant, of course, no more than are those of the great and the good, but at least they don’t do as much harm.

  All these dead voices in the unquiet grave are concerned only with the immediate quotidian—the stolen seaweed, who is marrying whom, a donkey’s trespass, what somebody’s will contains, how the publican robbed them—although there are distant echoes of national politics and even of the Second World War. But all human life is here; and if you were to transfer yourself to any part of the world even today and to listen to the clatter of local voices, it would be not that much different from what you will encounter in The Dirty Dust.

  This book is generally seen as one of the greatest achievements of the Irish* novel. Although the Irish language can boast the longest unbroken vernacular literature in all of Europe with the exception of Greek, and indeed, one of the greatest of all European literatures until the modern period, its development was ruptured during the English conquest. Thus the novel came late in Irish, as it did in most noncosmopolitan pre-urban societies. While Irish did have a lively prose tradition up until the middle of the seventeenth century, for political and social reasons it went into rapid decline during the following two hundred years. As literacy in the language was minimal, there was little chance of developing the novel. This changed with the resurgence of interest in the language in the late nineteenth century and in particular after the independence of the new Irish Free State, when a fresh generation of Irish readers appeared.

  A common theme in the early Irish novels was a depiction of life in Irish-speaking communities, often referred to as the Gaeltacht. While Gaeltacht originally meant Irish speakers, it came to mean those areas in which Irish was the dominant language. Most of these were in the west of Ireland, one of the largest being in Connemara, where Ó Cadhain was born. These novels often painted the Gaeltacht and its people in a glowing idyllic light, or if they didn’t, they were perceived to do so. One writer, Séamus Ó Grianna, remarked that he would never knowingly write a word of which his mother would be ashamed. The Dirty Dust burst in upon this world with its robust talk, its mean-spirited characters, its petty pursuits, and its great mirth.

  Its publication met with immediate acclaim, but not universal. One critic damned it as “a dirty book,” when dirty books were banned in the hundreds. Another claimed he would never have supported the Irish language if he had thought it would lead to such abuses as this. Yet another, that such conversation shouldn’t be put into the mouth of a dog. On the other hand, it was widely read out loud in Ó Cadhain’s own Gaeltacht, rapidly became a best-seller, and gained classic status among Irish-speakers. One writer remembers that his mates in secondary school would wait eagerly for the next instalment when it was first being serialised in a newspaper. The author recalls walking through a crowd at a football match and hearing a spectator mutter, “There goes The Dirty Dust.” It was referenced in the Dáil, the Irish parliament. There has been a bigger critical literature around it than around any other single Irish novel, and like all major works of art there is no single consensus as to what it “means.”

  Máirtín Ó Cadhain believed that speech was the best way to depict what was going on inside p
eople’s heads, which explains a good deal about the narrative structure of the novel. It was said that it was based on a short story by Dostoyevsky on the one hand, and Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology on the other. In reply to this wild speculation about its origins, he recounted an incident that happened in his own area some years previous to his writing it. A woman was being buried on a particularly miserable rainy day in Connemara and the gravediggers had inadvertently opened the wrong grave. The day was so bad they couldn’t dig another, so they chucked her into the one they had already opened. Then someone realised that they were putting her coffin down on top of an old adversary. One of the onlookers muttered: “Oh holy cow, there’s going to be one almighty gabble!”

  Máirtín Ó Cadhain was born in 1906 in a completely Irish-speaking area. He said that he never heard English spoken until he was six years of age. He trained as a primary schoolteacher in Dublin and taught in various schools throughout Connemara and east Galway. He became involved in illegal republican politics and in community activism and was dismissed from his position as a teacher after a row with the parish priest in 1936. He had already begun to write stories and translated a really bad novel by Charles Kickham for An Gúm, which is best described as a government publishing house. He moved to Dublin in search of employment but continued his republican activities.

  Shortly after the outbreak of the Second World War he was imprisoned without trial in an internment camp which the then government had put aside especially for dissenters. Although he had one book of stories published in 1939, it is claimed that his years of imprisonment were his real education as a writer. His letters show that he read voraciously and wrote furiously. It is no surprise, then, that his first great burst of creativity took place immediately after the war, the period in which this novel was written.

  He was a prodigious writer, with five collections of short stories published during his lifetime and another after his death. His collected works include novels, stories, lectures, letters, polemics, political tracts, history, translations, satires, and other writings which are entirely unclassifiable. Having worked at various slave labour jobs, he was appointed to a lectureship in Irish in Trinity College Dublin because of his deep and abiding knowledge of literature garnered from tireless reading and his almost unsurpassed knowledge of contemporary Irish speech. He eventually was appointed to the Chair of Irish in the same university the year before his death.

  The Dirty Dust should best be read as a symphony of voices, although a cacophony of voices might be more appropriate. It is at turns a series of monologues, which can become duologues, rise up to vindictive diatribes and fade out at judicious and injudicious moments. There is a narrative, but you have to listen for the threads. There is more than one story, but they are all interrelated. We have to suss out what each person is saying according to each’s own obsession—a phrase can tell us who is talking—or each’s one singular moan, or each’s big bugbear like a signature tune. It is like switching channels on an old radio, now you hear this, and then you hear this other. Once you get the knack, the story rattles on with pace. It was natural for it to be made into a hugely successful radio play; it has also been staged several times, and even more surprisingly, it has been made into a darkly comic film.

  The novel is also replete with references to Irish storytelling traditions, to mythology, to sagas, and to songs, which were all part of the common discourse. Indeed, there are verses of songs thrown in which were often meant to be extempore. One person would cast out a few lines as a challenge, and another person had to answer them. This was all normal in the community, whereas nowadays people’s points of reference may well be TV shows or the doings of some flash celebrity. The mental furniture of another time and a different place is never easily transferred, but we must at least recognise it for what it is.

  The main character, if it can be said that such exists, is Caitriona Paudeen. She is not a woman you would have liked to meet in real life, although meeting her in the next would be just as scary. If she has a love of her life it is well hidden, but the hatred of her life is her sister, Nell. Their bitterness sweetens the story throughout. Everyone in the community is dragged into this hatred, old sores are opened, old scores are maintained, and permanent grudges are given new life. We are given a full picture of a closed community largely indifferent to the outside world, a picture with warts and more warts, but we are also energised by their wonderful and beautiful and terrible and gruesome and magic humanity.

  It should not be thought that this was Ó Cadhain’s only view of life in his community. His choice to write in this fashion was an artistic one, while many of his other stories dealing with the traditional life from which he came can be tender, tragic, and sensitive. While many of the women in The Dirty Dust are savage amazons, much of his writing is concerned with the personal and societal entrapment of women, either in economic slavery, or in barrenness, or having lost children. He knew well the price of poverty and the crushing of the human spirit that it often brought.

  Translating this novel into English was a linguistic challenge. Translating the simplest story is a huge challenge, as languages are not algebraic equations. There has not been much modern Irish prose translated into English or into other languages, and some of what has been translated has been rendered into Anglo-Irish Synge-like gobbledegook. While this may have its own charm for some, it makes its Irish speakers sound like peasants and idiots and simpletons and clodhoppers. The Irish speakers of Irish Ireland were just as normal and as intelligent and as thick as the people of any other community, ever. I felt that the tradition of making good Irish people speak like bog trotters, hayseeds, and hillbillies should be avoided. There is also the added difficulty that what we used to call Hiberno-English is now as dead as the diplodocus. Whatever the parlous state of the Irish language, which has been under unrelenting pressure for hundreds of years, it has far more life in it than the fag ends of the peculiar way English used to be spoken in Ireland. Apart from a phrase here and there, English in Ireland is as undistinguishable as English in the U.S. or the U.K., and even the erstwhile pronunciation of many Irish people is being rapidly smoothed out by contact with our betters.

  On the other hand, to use some version of sub–Jane Austen–like polite urbanities and words of pleasantly standardised appropriateness would be a total denial of the energy and manic creativity of Ó Cadhain’s prose. Is not the word “appropriate” the most disgusting word in the entire English language? It means no more than that snobby people do not like unsnobby things. The challenge was to get some of the tone and vivacity of the original across without seeming too bizarre. English is a much standardised language with a wonderful and buzzing demotic lurking beneath. I tried to match the original Irish common speech with the familiar versions of demotic English that we know, mixing and mashing as necessary, and even inventing when required. But slang is always a trap. The more hip you are, the sooner you die. Language changes unsubtly from one half-generation to the under-ten-year-olds just coming after. There is no imaginable way to keep up with the whirl of changing language. Irish is no different, and much of the Irish of The Dirty Dust in the original would be incomprehensible and even weird to many native Irish speakers now. That Irish, after all, was the Irish of a generation born in the nineteenth century, when knowledge of English was minimal, and is a language much changed today, when nearly all of its speakers are bilingual.

  There are some constants within this change, however. The characters in The Dirty Dust call to one another by their names, as this is far more common in Irish than in English. A familiar halloo is commonly greeted by using someone’s name. I have tried to follow this, but have on occasions left it out, as it would appear tiresome and unnatural. Likewise there is much that might be seen as “bad language.” As someone who fervently believes that there is no such thing as bad language except that which is tired and dull and clichéd going forward outside the box, the language of The Dirty Dust pulsates with energy
and brio and gutsiness. It is full of creative curses and inventive imprecations. If one objects to some of the crudity from a linguistically puritanical point of view, it should be remembered that the most common curses in Irish derived from the “Devil” himself, and to those who believed in him and his works and pomps, this was far worse than any “fuck” or “shit”’ or their attendant pards. “Damning” someone to the horrors of Hell for all eternity was probably the worst that you could do. Modern “bad language” is a mild and ghostly shadow of the serious stuff of the past.

  Ultimately, as we know, there is no easy equivalence between languages. It is not the meaning itself which is the problem but the tone, and feel, and echo. I have no idea whether this works or not in this translation. It may do so for some, and not for others. There is no such thing as a literal translation, as the simplest small word beyond “cat” and “dog” expands into a foliage of ambiguity. Even a fairly direct word like baile in Irish throws up difficulties. It appears all over the country, most usually as “Bally” in place-names, and usually refers to a town or a village. This, however, is a more recent growth, as the original Irish most probably refers to a cluster of houses, not quite “settlement,” not quite “town land,” more like “just around here where I live.”

  The title itself raised some problems, but also some mirth. The most literal translation of Cré na Cille might be “The earth of the graveyard,” but this doesn’t have any sense of the ring of the original. I must presume that Ó Cadhain put in the alliteration for his own purposes as he had done with other titles. On the other hand, Cré can also mean “creed,” or “belief”—perhaps a pun for the discerning reader, to whom “The Common Creed” might come to mind. “Cemetery Clay” certainly also gives the necessary consonants, but I just don’t like it. If I was determined to stick with those lovely Cs, there was always “Cemetery Chatter,” “Crypt Comments,” or “Coffin Cant.” I toyed with a title such as “Six Feet Under,” which would be a normal colloquialism for being buried, and it does retain a certain aptness. Once I was on this road, however, many suggestions rose up from the deep: “Graveyard Gabble,” “Talking Deads,” “The Last Words,” “The Way of All Trash,” “Undercurrents,” “Tomb Talk,” “All the Dead Voices,” “Beneath the Sods,” “Deadly Breathing,” “Biddies in the Boneyard,” and much more, culminating in “A Hundred Years of Verbitude.” Ó Cadhain’s first book of stories is entitled Idir Shúgradh is Dáiríre (Between joking and seriousness), and he once observed that if there ever was a single particular Irish trait it was the ability, even the necessity, to mix fun with solemnity. He might have preferred some of the above to The Dirty Dust, which I finally settled on in order to maintain some sense of the rhythm of the original, along with the biblical echoes that dust we are and “unto dust we shall return,” while not forgetting that what goes on below amongst the skulls and cross words is certainly dirty.