The Dirty Dust (46 page)

Born in Cork in 1947, A
LAN
T
ITLEY
is a writer and scholar. He is a member of the Royal Irish Academy and Professor Emeritus of Modern Irish in UCC, and former head of the Irish Department at St. Patrick's College, DCU. Apart from his scholarly work, he is the author of seven novels, four collections of short stories, numerous plays, one collection of poetry, and several film scripts on literary and historical topics for television.

*
Máirtín Ó Cadhain may seem difficult to pronounce to anybody without knowledge of the Irish language. His name has never been Anglicised and we are not going to do it here. But for the sake of pronunciation it might be rendered as something like Marteen O'Kine.

*
Just in case of ambiguity, “Irish” here refers to the Irish language, and “Irish literature” refers to writing in the Irish language, just as “English literature” generally refers to that which is written in English, or “Spanish literature” to that which is written in Spanish. The term is linguistic and not geographical. “Irish” is sometimes erroneously referred to as “Gaelic.” The Irish language should never be referred to as “Gaelic” because doing so is historically, socially, formally, and linguistically wrong. “Gaelic” is now correctly applied to the principal historical language of Scotland, although it also was referred to (in English) as “Irish” for most of its history. The distinction is not subtle: “Irish” refers to the native language of Ireland, and “Gaelic” refers to the major native language of Scotland, although the term came into common usage only in the past two hundred years, or less.

*
The Goom (An Gúm) was a state publishing house established in 1927 to publish books in Irish for the general public and for schools. Máirtín Ó Cadhain's early stories were published by An Gúm, but he always had a fractious relationship with them. This is one of the many asides in the novel where he is poking fun at his literary adversaries.