Abstract 

Taking cue from Pascale Casanova’s differentiation between “national” and “international” authors, the lecture explores Máirtín Ó Cadhain’s thoughts on his own place in the network of world literature. These are characterized by a paradoxical relation between the author’s many foreign sources of inspiration and his insistence that the writer in Irish “is writing for his own people and only for his people”. Accordingly, his best-known novel Cré na Cille was primarily intended for home audience, although Ó Cadhain never opposed plans to translate it into English and other languages. On the other hand, the reception of the book in Anglophone countries, Germany and the Czech Republic shows that the text is, despite its wealth of reference to Irish literature and folklore, relatively easily transferable to other cultural milieus. The lecture highlights some reasons why it might be so, including the novel’s cast of memorable characters and the build-up of the text as an encyclopaedic narrative, which is, according to Edward Mendelson, a recognizable (although rare) genre in the history of Western writing. An important key to the novel is its use of the carnivalesque, a literary mode that displays, as shown by Mikhail Bakhtin, close links to the natural cycle of death and rebirth. Accordingly, the ideal result of the novel’s international success would be the cycle’s affirmation – an incentive to growth for both international and Irish-language literature.