In this presentation I will explore the literary and cultural importance of Peig's autobiographies by looking at them through the lens of translation from an imperialist perspective. We say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay The first time I heard about Peig Sayers was from my mother, who, for every year of my secondary school, asked me curiously if I was studying Peigs Sayers. Being a typical Leaving Cert student, my mother couldn't remember anything about Peig except that it was a deeply boring and depressing text. I never studied Peig Sayers in school - he was removed from the course long before then. Yet that knowledge never stopped my mother from asking me, as if she hoped we could bond despite mutual trauma. Peig's story is one of long suffering throughout her life. She recounts many hardships, from the interruption of her wedding day due to the death of her niece, to the tragic death of her son as a teenager. Yet I think it's amazing to think about the general perception of Peig, exemplified in my mother, when we look at her. There is a particular generation of Irishmen whose knowledge of Peig Sayers goes no further than my mother's. They consider Peig's story dark, miserable, and full of hardship; however, in her life Peig was anything but boring to those around her. Peig was a storyteller of epic proportions to those in the Great Blasket community, renowned for her magnificent repertoire of European folktales and legends of Irish heroes. Born on the mainland, Peig left school at thirteen to work as a laborer. When her brother found her a partner, Peig took the opportunity to build a home for herself. She married Pádraig Ó Gaoithín and moved with him to Great Blasket Island. It is crucial to contextualize how we came to have Peig's autobiographies. During the literary and cultural revival many Blasket Islanders were encouraged by scholars and activists to write and document their lives. One of the reasons why the Blasket Island texts became so important was because the islanders were seen as completely separate from mainland Ireland, with all its anglicisation and industrialisation. Peig commissioned her son Mike to write down her life stories as she could neither read nor write Irish. When you encounter texts that have been translated it is essential to consider them a form of rewriting. Translation almost always involves a renegotiation and a "re" or "mis" representation of the original text. It causes a linguistic and cultural clash that cannot always be resolved and raises questions of reappropriation and remaking: how much freedom can the translator take while maintaining the integrity of the original? This is especially relevant when looking at Peig's lyrics, since from the point of view of the revivalists, these lyrics were intended to awaken and revitalize the Irish language. All of this is to say that the Blasket Island books, when written, were seen as representing the peasant narrative of Ireland. – this gave them a cultural and aesthetic “Irishness” that reproduced a deeply authentic narrative in the eyes of many revivalist scholars. They have been instrumentalized in safeguarding and perpetuating the Irish language in the face of anglicisation and in reclaiming the indigenousness of the Irish people. This narrative of the noble peasant is comparable to the noble savage we see in many colonial texts in other parts of the world, for example in New Zealand and Australia. In the Irish context, peasant life was seen as the essence.