Deep Wheel Orcadia
Ratings5
Average rating3.5
15
Ratings5
Average rating3.5
Deep Wheel Orcadia is, effortlessly, a first: a science-fiction verse novel written in the Orcadian dialect, it's also the first full-length book in the Orkney language in over 50 years Astrid is returning home from art school on Mars, looking for inspiration. Darling is fleeing a life that never fit, searching for somewhere to hide. They meet on Deep Wheel Orcadia, a distant space station struggling for survival as the pace of change threatens to leave the community behind. Deep Wheel Orcadia is a magical first: a science fiction verse novel written in the Orkney dialect. This unique adventure in minority language poetry comes with a parallel translation into playful and vivid English, so the reader will miss no nuance of the original. The rich and varied cast weaves a compelling, lyric and effortlessly readable story around place and belonging, work and economy, generation and gender politics, love and desire - all with the lightness of touch, fluency and musicality one might expect of one the most talented poets to have emerged from Scotland in recent years. Hailing from Orkney, Harry Josephine Giles is widely known as a fine poet and spellbindingly original performer of their own work; Deep Wheel Orcadia now strikes out into audacious new space.
Reviews with the most likes.
Foodmeat.
I don't really get it. The native dialect poetry was lovely to read and I appreciate the effort to try something new; but, the narrative and characters were uneventful and forgettable.
What really lost it for me though was the extremely odd choice to concatenate a string of synonyms together in the translation even if clearly some of them made no sense in context. I can understand there may not be a perfect 1:1 translation for some things; but, at points it became a little obsurd.
