Description

Juana Castro

The Color of Rivers

Translated by Ana Valverde Osan

ISBN: 978-1-944884-48-2 (pbk.)
156 Pages: 18.95
October, 2018

The Color of Rivers tells the story of three women—grandmother, mother, daughter—at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War in the hard agrarian countryside around Cordoba, mythic land of the Moorish Caliphate in Spain and famous for its poets. In this last long poem by Juana Castro, with a lyric sensitivity beautifully translated by Ana Valaverde Osan, we are first presented with the story of the grandmother who, as a young child, painfully must take the role of a boy after her mother dies and her father is left with no one to help him with the chores in the fields. After undergoing many difficulties, incest being one of them, she ends up becoming a strong, assertive woman whose legacy to her daughter and granddaughter is an ennobled sense of female identity and the power of the word.