Kit Fryatt & Harry Gilonis - Book of Inversions
Veer2 Publication 050 [ISBN: 978-1-911567-83-7], 15.87x 23.49cm size, Portrait. 100 pages. B&W. October 2025. £10.00 (+ postage and packing)
Kit Fryatt & Harry Gilonis - Book of Inversions
Taking its title from the mediaeval Irish ‘Book of Invasions’, Book of Inversions upends standard models of translation and sets them to rights again. From literal and faithful versions to ‘faithless’ writing allowing language free play, this book aims to cover the field of action. Whatever your taste, there should be something here to annoy you.
“Book of Inversions is a sort of irreverent hall of mirrors: transportive, mischievous, rhythmic, and arresting; by turns bitter and sweet, outlandish and moving. Echoes across time are caught and thrown in a dazzling volley. Fryatt and Gilonis, in these poems, bring out the humane, irreverent atmosphere of the ancients with an anarchic, refreshing humour, both earthing the modern and electrifying the old.”
— Seán Hewitt
“Once in a while a new form of access to Irish-language poetry makes itself felt. It happened with James Clarence Mangan, it happened with Frank O’Connor, and it happened with Flann O’Brien’s Sweeney. Now with Book of Inversions it has happened again. Slick, voluble, cantankerous, witty, Fryatt and Gilonis’s translations bristle with zany energy, travestying familiar texts into brilliantly readable English. Embracing anachronism and the ire of the purist, yet warmly generous and full of scholarly divilment, these poems mark a – what’s the Old Irish for ‘paradigm shift’? – in the art of translation.”
— David Wheatley
This is part of a new series of Veer Books to be produced and published jointly in the University of Surrey and the CPRC, Birkbeck College.
Taking its title from the mediaeval Irish ‘Book of Invasions’, Book of Inversions upends standard models of translation and sets them to rights again. From literal and faithful versions to ‘faithless’ writing allowing language free play, this book aims to cover the field of action. Whatever your taste, there should be something here to annoy you.
“Book of Inversions is a sort of irreverent hall of mirrors: transportive, mischievous, rhythmic, and arresting; by turns bitter and sweet, outlandish and moving. Echoes across time are caught and thrown in a dazzling volley. Fryatt and Gilonis, in these poems, bring out the humane, irreverent atmosphere of the ancients with an anarchic, refreshing humour, both earthing the modern and electrifying the old.”
— Seán Hewitt
“Once in a while a new form of access to Irish-language poetry makes itself felt. It happened with James Clarence Mangan, it happened with Frank O’Connor, and it happened with Flann O’Brien’s Sweeney. Now with Book of Inversions it has happened again. Slick, voluble, cantankerous, witty, Fryatt and Gilonis’s translations bristle with zany energy, travestying familiar texts into brilliantly readable English. Embracing anachronism and the ire of the purist, yet warmly generous and full of scholarly divilment, these poems mark a – what’s the Old Irish for ‘paradigm shift’? – in the art of translation.”
— David Wheatley
This is part of a new series of Veer Books to be produced and published jointly in the University of Surrey and the CPRC, Birkbeck College.