Name: Thirty-Two Words for Field: Lost Words of the Irish Landscape
Price: 21.35 EUR
Availability: InStock
Author: Manchán Magan
ISBN: 9781645023760

portada Thirty-Two Words for Field: Lost Words of the Irish Landscape

Thirty-Two Words for Field: Lost Words of the Irish Landscape

Type

Physical Book

Author

Manchán Magan

Publisher

Rizzoli

Year

2026

Language

English

Pages

256

Format

Paperback

Dimensions

21.59 x 13.97 cm

ISBN13

9781645023760

Thirty-Two Words for Field: Lost Words of the Irish Landscape

Manchán Magan (Author) · Rizzoli · Paperback

New Book Imported to Austria

Delivery: 07 Aug - 11 Aug

21,35 €

Import costs and 10% VAT included in the price ✅

21,35 €

Add to Wishlist

Synopsis "Thirty-Two Words for Field: Lost Words of the Irish Landscape"

"What a joyful, profound, passionate revelry of a book this is—an illumination of how words make worlds; a reminder of what is lost when a language is lost; an act of salvage for ways of being and seeing which are fast vanishing."—Robert Macfarlane, author of Is a River Alive?

Rediscover the lost words of an ancient land in this new and updated edition of an international bestseller.

The Irish language has thirty-two words for field. Among them are: Geamhar – a field of corn-grass • Tuar – a field for cattle at night • Reidhlean – a field for games or dancing • Cathairin – a field with a fairy-dwelling in it.

The richness of the Irish language is closely tied to the natural landscape and offers a more magical way of seeing the world. 

Most people associate Britain and Ireland with the English language, a vast, sprawling linguistic tree with roots in Latin, French, and German. But the inhabitants of these islands originally spoke another tongue. Look closely enough and English contains traces of the Celtic soil from which it sprung, found in words like bog, loch, cairn, and crag. Today, this heritage can be found nowhere more powerfully than in modern-day Gaelic. 

In Thirty-Two Words for Field, bestselling Irish author Manchán Magan explores how Gaelic, a three-thousand-year-old lexicon, has imbued the natural world with meaning and magic, evoking a time-honored way of life, from its thirty-two separate words for a field to terms like bróis (whiskey for a horseman at a wedding), iarmhaireacht (the loneliness you feel when you are the only person awake at dawn), and bladhmann (steam rising from a fermented haystack or idle boasting). 

Manchán urges readers to consider the sublime beauty and profound oddness of this ancient tongue that has been spoken in close connection to the land for thousands of years. Told through stories collected from his own life and travels, Thirty-Two Words for Field is an enthralling celebration of Irish words and a testament to the indelible relationship between landscape, culture, and language.

"This is a remarkable work that deepened my feeling of connection to a living world and expanded my sense of the possible.”
—Merlin Sheldrake, author of Entangled Life

Manchán Magan

(Author)

View Author's Page

Manchán Magan es escritor y documentalista. Ha escrito libros sobre sus viajes por África, India y Sudamérica, además de dos novelas.

Escribe ocasionalmente para The Irish Times , informa sobre viajes en diversos programas de radio y ha presentado docenas de documentales sobre temas de cultura mundial para TG4, RTÉ y Travel Channel. Vive en un robledal, con abejas y gallinas, en una casa con techo de paja cerca de Lough Lene, en el condado de Westmeath.

Su libro más reciente, Thirty-Two Words for Field (2020), explora cómo la lengua irlandesa está profundamente conectada con el paisaje y fue reseñado en The Irish Times como "una exploración arqueológica y antropológica vibrante del lirismo, el misterio y las rarezas de la lengua irlandesa, y las capas de conocimiento antiguo codificadas en su interior".

See less