[...] She kens sheu disno sing
in tune, but at the plant an wi her screens sheu sings.
rereading Harry Josephine Giles’s Deep Wheel Orcadia with a Scots-speaking friend I am once again just in awe of this book. it’s so fucking good. if you haven’t read it yet, you need to.
if you are not familiar with it, Deep Wheel Orcadia is a verse novel in Orcadian Scots, accompanied by English prose intertonguings, a technique Giles borrows from the Scottish Gaelic and Irish poet Rody Gorman, at the foot of the page; she refers to this as a “combinatory translation method”, which is perhaps more accurate when comparing Giles’s intertonguings with Gorman’s intertonguings. the gist is that for unfamiliar words (Gorman does them for every content word) she layers multiple possible senses — not all of which are necessarily the primary or “active” sense in a given context, so the word “guff” in the Scots is intertongued as “stinkpuffsnortnonsense” in the English. I would recommend focusing on the Scots — not least because there’s some really nice work with meter in here — but as I’ll discuss below the English is less a translation of the Scots than a complement to the Scots, so it’s worth a look, as well.
the novel has two main plot strands: first, the encounter and burgeoning relationship between Astrid, an artist from the space station Deep Wheel Orcadia who has returned home from art school on Mars, and Darling, a woman on the run from her controlling, rich, implicitly transphobic family (also on Mars) who is seeking refuge on the station; second, the increasingly obvious decline in the station’s economy, which is dependent on the harvesting of a mysterious substance called “Light” that fuels (ironically) faster-than-light travel but which is slowly becoming rarer and rarer. weaving between these stories are the stories of an ensemble cast: the rebellious child Gunnie; the bar owner Eynar, who wants to retire; the archaeologist Noor, who is studying the mysterious wrecks, objects-vehicles of unknown origin that appear without explanation in the Lights; Astrid’s parents, Inga and Øyvind; Higgie, the last remaining coder after the rest of her team’s jobs were automated out from under them; and others. the result is both a compelling personal story — Astrid and Darling’s relationship — and a powerful story of a community whose economy is based on precarious labor and resource extraction, looking towards an uncertain future.
rereading the novel, and in particular reading both the Scots and the English in full, I was thinking about audience and who the intertonguings are for. it seems to me that they are navigating between two functions. on the one hand, they provide glosses of some of Giles’s science-fictional usages: “yotun”, for example, is consistently glossed in the intertonguing as “gas giant” (rather than simply “giant”, the mythical creature), and “poly” is glossed as “plasticpolymer”. (the one notable counterexample on this front is the word “ansible”, which is glossed simply as “ansible”; I thought this was a bit jarring, honestly, since it requires the reader to be familiar with a very specific group of post-Le Guin texts that use the word.) the juxtaposition of Scots and English allows for some wordplay not unlike gikun in Japanese: “godssend” is glossed, for example, as “salvagewrecktreasure”. in this respect, it seems to me that one function of the intertonguings is to guide Scots-speakers who are not habitual science fiction readers (and, indeed, likely not habitual readers of Scots at all) through a text that moves far outside the realms of their everyday experiences of the language. on the other hand, of course, the intertonguings serve to guide English-speakers through the Scots text. in particular, though, the combinatory words, though I would have liked more of them, inevitably point readers back to the Scots.
I don’t always love Rody Gorman’s work in Gaelic, but his intertonguings strike a careful balance between languages, creating a text that is legible as a (formally very experimental and pretty alienating) poem in English but also also creating an obstacle to reading the text in English, encouraging Gaelic readers to focus on the Gaelic text, while also usefully activating multiple possible layers of meaning within words that wouldn’t necessarily immediately come to mind. the result is something that is legible in English while also actively enriching the Gaelic text, which it pushes the reader back towards. this is why I wish Giles’s intertonguings had been perhaps a bit more alienating to English-speakers.
the poetry is also just. really good. it’s mostly free verse, but with consistent stanza lengths across any given poem, and there are some gorgeous turns of meter, like the run of iambs in the quotation I began with. one major aspect of the Scots text that the English misses is the interplay of languages: the residents of Deep Wheel Orcadia speak Scots, but incomers — Darling and Noor — speak English, a difference that is marked within the text, most notably in the poem “Astrid taks Darling haem fer dinner”, about Astrid’s rising horror at a family dinner as she realizes not only her parents but also she herself are slowly standardizing their language until
[...] the conversaetion is faggan, faan,
is hearan hidsel, is less an less real gittan,
til hid’s jeust Darling at’s smilan an spaekan yet.
notwithstanding its (eu?)catastrophic finale, the climax of the poem is perhaps Astrid and Darling’s argument at a community dance, which is also the moment Scots intrudes — or integrates — into Darling’s speech:
[...] Sheu fires:
“Just because you lost your home,
doesn’t mean the rest of us
can’t look for ours,” an “Some of us never
had a piece.” The wird is cruel.
the cruel word in question being the Scots “piece”, glossed in the English as “placedistancepartwhile”. this is the tension at the heart of the novel: the meaning of home, what it means to be from a place, what it means to go to a place, what it means to return to a place. (I am reminded here also of Delany’s observation about “home” in Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand: “It’s the place you can never visit for the first time, because by the time it’s become “home,” you’ve already been there. You can only return. (You can never go home, only go home again.)”) Astrid is caught between what she is slowly realizing are two homes; Darling between two places, one a “home” she’s fleeing, where she does not belong, the other a “home” she yearns for, where she does not yet belong but perhaps could.
Deep Wheel Orcadia is, in either language, or both languages, a powerful, moving novel. I hope we’ll get more things like from Giles, in verse or prose, in the future.
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