In 1948, the Irish-language writer Máirtín Ó Cadhain received the kind of rejection letter a novelist might dream of getting. He had submitted his foul-mouthed first novel, “Cré na Cille” (“Churchyard Clay”), to his publisher, only to see it denied on the ground that it was too “Joycean.” This wasn’t meant as a compliment: it was the prudish publisher’s way of calling the book bawdy. A furious Ó Cadhain (pronounced O’Kine) took the novel elsewhere. In 1949, the Irish Press serialized it nationally over seven months, and the following year, the boutique publisher Sáirséal agus Dill released a bound version. The book became the talk of the Irish-speaking world. Young Irish speakers read it aloud to their illiterate grandparents—in Galway, according to one writer, college students passed the thrice-weekly Irish Press installments from hand to hand, and scrounged to buy the book when it appeared in stores.

Today, “Cré na Cille” is considered Joycean in a less euphemistic sense. A dust-jacket blurb from Colm Tóibín declares it “the greatest novel to be written in the Irish language, and among the best books to come out of Ireland in the twentieth century.” Scholars of Irish writing have hailed it as “a masterpiece” and “one of the most outstanding works in contemporary European literature.” “No superlatives can exaggerate its importance,” one early reviewer declared. Ó Cadhain, the critic Seán Ó Tuama wrote in 1972, produced “the most consciously-patterned and richly-textured prose that any Irishman has written in this century, except Beckett and Joyce.”

But for almost seventy years, Ó Cadhain’s greatest work remained inaccessible to nearly all Irish readers, because it was written in Irish Gaelic, a language vanishingly few of them speak, and it had never been translated into English. As if in overcorrection of this historical lapse, Yale University Press, together with the Irish-language publishing house Cló Iar-Chonnacht, has now put out not one but two English translations. For the first time, English speakers untutored in the Irish tongue can experience the exquisite vulgarity of Ó Cadhain’s book, and perhaps begin to understand the exalted standing it has had among Irish readers for decades.

All of the characters in “Cré na Cille” are dead. They are not ghosts or spirits but rather chattering, coffin-bound corpses, buried in a graveyard on Ireland’s west coast during the Second World War. They have left behind a world of rural hardship—a place where poor, Irish-speaking farmers eke out a living selling seaweed and periwinkles and coaxing potatoes out of rocky soil—only to find the bitter squabbles and petty pretensions of their villages continuing unabated in the ground. The book has no plot to speak of and unfolds entirely through dialogue. Dozens of voices make themselves known through a circuitous invocation of grievances and gossip: the Big Master, a haughty schoolteacher, declares his widow a “harlot” upon learning she quickly remarried after his death; Nora Johnny, a woman who once spent scandalous evenings with sailors in Galway nightclubs, insists she’s found “culture” in the grave; an insurance salesman brags about the villagers he swindled; an elderly woman insists she’d still be alive if she’d had the strength to lift herself out of the fire she fell into one day; someone repeatedly pledges allegiance to Hitler. Above all others rises the voice of Caitriona Paudeen, a viperous old woman who has long despised her (still-living) sister Nell, for marrying a man they both loved:

I thought I’d live for another couple of years, and I’d bury her before me, the cunt. She’s gone down a bit since her son got injured. She was going to the doctor for a good bit before that, of course. But there’s nothing wrong with her. Rheumatism. Sure, that wouldn’t kill her for years yet […] I nearly buried her. If I had lived just a tiny little bit more …

The inhabitants of the graveyard are hopelessly self-involved, but the book transcends their narrow purview. Their quotidian fixations and pious self-posturing achieve a magnificently improbable universality: look past the talk of seaweed farming and pilgrimages to sacred wells, and you start to sense that the corpses’ gripes and tall-tales—about drunken excursions, sticky-fingered neighbors, scheming paramours—are the same ones heard at bars and bus stops from Baltimore to Beijing.

At the same time, Ó Cadhain knew that writing in a language that few read limited his audience. “The writer in Irish, whether good, bad, or indifferent,” he declared in a 1969 lecture, “is writing for his own people and only for his own people.” Ó Cadhain’s “own people” very much resembled the characters of “Cré na Cille,” and he was fiercely dedicated to them. Born in 1906 to poor, Irish-speaking farmers on the country’s rugged west coast, Ó Cadhain escaped the hardscrabble life of many of his peers to become a grade-school teacher. An avowed socialist by his early twenties, he co-founded an activist organization that fought for the land and language rights of the country’s small, disenfranchised population of Irish speakers.

He also joined the I.R.A., an affiliation that caused him no end of trouble: in 1936, a priest who disagreed with his activism sacked him from his post as principal of a country school; from 1939 to 1944, the government held him in a prison camp for political dissidents. But he never relented, rousing crowds at protests even as his health failed him. In Ó Cadhain’s view, the threat to the language from government neglect and emigration was existential, and the outlook bleak. Toward the end of his life, an interviewer asked him where he thought the country was headed. “If we lose the Irish language, we lose our native literature,” he said, looking morose. “We’ll be finished as a people. The vision that every generation of Irish people had will be at an end.”

Sixty-six years is a long time to wait for an English translation of a book written and published a ferry-ride away from England. Why the delay? Rumors have long swirled that Ó Cadhain, angry at the social and cultural dominance of the English language, refused to permit a translation. But such a steadfast refusal seems unlikely: the original contract that Ó Cadhain signed addressed the question of translation, defining the payment he’d receive for one. It also included a provision, standard in the publisher’s contracts, imposing a two-year moratorium on translations after the original was published—and stipulating that a translation could be released only if the publisher felt satisfied its quality wouldn’t “diminish the author’s reputation.”