The Dirty Dust (2 page)

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
C
s, 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.

I have taken some liberties with this translation, but not many. Certainly not as many as those which Máirtín Ó Cadhain took in his very first work of translation. His first manuscript version of that bad Charles J. Kickham novel
Sally Kavanagh
was returned to the publisher with nearly twice as many words as the original! There was always a tradition in translation in Ireland of taking some freedoms, and it would have been untraditional of me not to do likewise.

The main reason that Máirtín Ó Cadhain was so profligate with words was that he couldn't help it. His supreme gift was his torrent of words which gushed and laughed and overflowed in a flush of excess. Not only was this the way he wrote, it was also the way he spoke. But every writer's supreme gift is also his weakness, as he cannot be everything. The writer Liam O'Flaherty once advised him to take a scissors to his prose, although he probably meant a bill-hook. If he had, he would not have been Máirtín Ó Cadhain, but only an anaemic version of him.

His inability to be unable not to let fly meant that although he tried his hand at drama, he was singularly unsuccessful. Drama demands some sense of structure and control of time, traits which he lacked. While
The Dirty Dust
does have a definite structure, it is big
and baggy enough for him to dump everything into. Readers therefore might find it odd that in this graveyard there are elections, and Rotary clubs, and writers, and even a French pilot who was washed up on the shore and interred with the others. If you are wondering what they are doing there, it is quite simply that Ó Cadhain as a public polemicist could not resist the temptation of taking subtle and not-so-subtle swipes at colleagues and at issues which intrigued or pissed him off. Much of the novel is satire, not only on the easy pieties of country life but on the snobbery, pretence, and charlatanry which were as much a part of his country then as they are now.

This satire goes deep in Irish literature and links it with texts at least as far back as the eighth-century
Fled Bricrenn
(The feast of Bricriu) and the twelfth-century
Aislinge meic Conglinne
(The vision of Mac Conglinne), but you don't have to know anything about this to enjoy Caitriona Paudeen's poison tongue, the Old Master's abiding jealousy, Nora Johnny's whoring after “culture,” and the entire inter-locking spite that gives them life while they are dead. There have only been about three hundred novels written in Irish since the start of the twentieth century, and if there were a typical mould, this certainly wouldn't be it. Like all great novels it is unique and is to be enjoyed as a feast of language, the kind of language you might hear outside a door when everybody inside is tearing themselves apart; or in a country graveyard in the dark light of day.

I would like to thank both Garry Bannister and the late David Sowby for their interest in this translation, and for their many helpful and often invaluable suggestions, which were a great assistance to me.

CAITRIONA PAUDEEN
Newly buried

PATRICK CAITRIONA
Her only son

NORA JOHNNY'S DAUGHTER
Wife of Patrick Caitriona. Living in Caitriona's house

MAUREEN
Patrick Caitriona and Nora Johnny's Daughter's young girl

NORA JOHNNY
Toejam Nora. Patrick Caitriona's mother-in-law

BABA PAUDEEN
A sister of Caitriona and of Nell. Living in America. Her will expected soon.

NELL PAUDEEN
A sister of Caitriona and of Baba

JACK THE LAD
Nell's husband

PETER NELL
Nell and Jack's son

BLOTCHY BRIAN'S MAGGIE
Peter Nell's wife

BLOTCHY BRIAN JUNIOR
Peter Nell and Blotchy Brian Maggie's son. Going for the priesthood.

BLOTCHY BRIAN
Maggie's father

FIRESIDE TOM
Relation of Caitriona and Nell. The two of them vying for his land.

MAGGIE FRANCES
Neighbour and bosom friend of Caitriona

Other Neighbours and Acquaintances

BIDDY SARAH
Keening woman, but fond of the drink

COLEY
Traditional storyteller. Can't read.

KITTY
Neighbour of Caitriona's who claimed to have lent her a pound but never got it back.

DOTIE
A sentimental woman

MARGARET
A friend of Kitty's

CHALKY STEVEN
He didn't go to Caitriona's funeral because he “hadn't heard” about it

PETER THE PUBLICAN
Pub owner. Still alive.

HUCKSTER JOAN
Shopkeeper

MICHAEL KITTY
Lying on top of Huckster Joan

TIM TOP OF THE ROAD
Lives in a hovel at the end of the town land. Accused of stealing by neighbours.