Join us as we count down to ALTA42: Sight and Sound with the National Translation Award in Poetry and Prose long- and shortlisted titles! We will be featuring the titles in alphabetical order alongside blurbs penned by our judges for the National Translation Awards in Poetry and Prose. This year’s prose judges are Bonnie Huie, Charlotte Mandell, and Jeffrey Zuckerman. This year’s judges for poetry are Anna Deeny Morales, Cole Heinowitz, and Sholeh Wolpe.

For quick reference, you may find the NTA longlists here, and the NTA shortlists here. Today we’re shining the spotlight on Poetry NTA longlisted title The Color of Rivers:

The Color of Rivers
by Juana Castro
translated from the Spanish by Ana Valverde Osan
(Diálogos)

Ana Valverde Osan has given us The Color of Rivers, the first English language translation of Spanish writer, Juana Castro. In this exquisite work, Castro suggests that extreme cruelty is as simple as the language she makes use of to convey it. However, The Color of Rivers is not just a series of poems that utter the incest of a child, the work of a child, her pregnancy and labor, or the loving of a daughter despite violation. Rather, this is a book about the foundations of ourselves as something we would like to believe unthinkable: incest and rape, but the possibility—yes—also of love. Castro’s and Valverde Osan’s poetry is never self-indulgent or sorrowful. Yet, its language is so seemingly uncomplicated because Castro represents what is humanity’s most deplorable truth: the voice of a child even our greatest poets and our most beautifully rendered languages have violated.