Colors! / Colores!

by Jorge Luján, Piet Grobler (Illustrator), John Simon (Translator), Rebecca Parfitt (Translator)

Overview

Noted poet Jorge Lujan and South Africa's illustrious illustrator Piet Grobler teamed up to produce this exquisite celebration of color.

As day turns into night, we are given fleeting, evocative glimpses of the qualities inherent in a range of colors. An antelope and some children are pictured inhabiting this delicate world.

This bilingual, bicultural book presents us with a beautiful vision of a planet in which nature, words, and the rising and setting of the sun and the moon exist in harmony.

Correlates to the Common Core State Standards in English Language Arts:

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.K.5
Recognize common types of texts (e.g., storybooks, poems).

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.K.6
With prompting and support, name the author and illustrator of a story and define the role of each in telling the story.

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.1.4
Identify words and phrases in stories or poems that suggest feelings or appeal to the senses.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781773067421
Publisher:	Groundwood Books
Publication date:	01/02/2024
Pages:	36
Sales rank:	321,904
Product dimensions:	9.60(w) x 11.40(h) x (d)
Age Range:	3 - 6 Years

About the Author

JORGE LUJÁN is an author, poet and musician. His body of work, translated into eighteen languages, includes Stephen and the Beetle, illustrated by Chiara Carrer; Doggy Slippers and Numeralia, illustrated by Isol; Colors! ¡Colores!, illustrated by Piet Grobler; and Moví la mano / I Moved My Hand, illustrated by Mandana Sadat. He has won the Premio de Poesía para Niños de ALIJA, and has been nominated for the 2024 Hans Christian Andersen Award and nominated eight times for the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award. He lives in Mexico.

PIET GROBLER is a world-renowned South African illustrator of children’s books. He has illustrated ninety five books, which have been published in many languages, and he has won a number of awards, including two silver medals at the Noma Concours (Japan), the Octogone de Chêne (France) and a Golden Apple at the Biennial of Illustration in Bratislava. He lives in Portugal and is the visiting Professor in Illustration at the University of Worcester, in the United Kingdom.

JOHN OLIVER SIMON (1942-2018) was a poet and translator from Berkeley, California. Among other accolades, he was awarded the NEA Translation Award and the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Berkeley Poetry Festival.

REBECCA PARFITT is a translator who lives in DeKalb, Illinois.

Read an Excerpt

Rocked by the tide, beige fell asleep on the sand El beige se durmió en la arena de tanto que lo arrulla la marea

Editorial Reviews

The language is by turns playful, contemplative and exuberant but always imbued with a subtle lyrical quality...This book pairs Lujan's text with the equally strong illustrations of Piet Grobler...Grobler's watercolour illustrations combine small whimsically detailed figures with loose wide bleeds of colour, each one managing to reflect the mood of the text perfectly. This is a lush and beautiful book...The English text is flawless while still preserving a subtle sense of linguistic magic and surprise...the book is captivating, aesthetically rich, linguistically fine-tuned, masterful...profoundly appealing...accessible for a preschool audience, [and] the originality and strength of the images will give it continued appeal for a primary school audience...a valuable resource for many classrooms and libraries...[a] success as a bilingual text. Highly Recommended.

CM Magazine

Unusually lyrical-visually and verbally-this is a 'concept book' that will take children beyond simple colour identification and into an appreciation more profound and rare: for the colours and beauties of nature, and for the colours and beauty of metaphor.

Toronto Star

K-Gr 3

From the delicate sunrise to the peace of deep night, this beautifully conceived and executed look at colors fuses minimalist, expressive poetry with exquisitely balanced watercolor paintings. "Rocked by the tide, beige fell asleep on the sand," opens the first spread, the sea shore suggested in the washed illustration. A few children and an antelope provide the link between pictures to create a cohesive whole. Who would not want to live in this world, where harmony is the touchstone? The poetry is just a tad better in the original Spanish, due mostly to its inherent assonance. However, the translators have done a solid job of keeping to the spirit of the original and approximating the rhythm and rhyme of the Spanish text. Possessing some of the delicate qualities of the art of the great Irene Haas and reminiscent of Mary O'Neill's classic Hailstones and Halibut Bones(Doubleday, 1961), this title remains sui generis. With great child appeal, Colors!/¡Colores! also has application as a pattern book for students of both poetry and art-and what an amazing way to introduce secondary colors, from pink to violet! An example of how one can paint with both brushes and words, this little book with classic potential deserves a place in both bookstores and libraries.-Ann Welton, Grant Center for the Expressive Arts, Tacoma, WA

Criticas

K-Gr 3- Short poems and vibrant watercolor illustrations wed successfully in this bilingual book, giving birth to a sensory exploration of nature's colors. On each spread, whimsical poetic comparisons add multiple dimensions to the seemingly simple hues ("Yellow/rolls/through/the/sky/like/a/warm/gold/coin") and suggest that colors can encompass something broader than us ("Into a tiny seed/fits clover, fits a tree,/fits the whole jungle.../fits green"). Subtleties present in the author's native Spanish are occasionally lost in translation (for example, the alliterative wordplay of Vio un lago,/vio una flor,/vio el ocaso,/¡violeta ! becomes "I saw a lake./I saw a flower./I saw the twilight./...Violet!"). Still, the essence of each poem remains intact. The colors are represented in beautiful paintings that contain both abstract depictions of nature as well as simple images of familiar outdoor things-birds, nests, leaves, flowers. Elegant details in the art and design further unify the poems and colors; a dynamic palette and other visual aids illustrate the passage of time, while an antelope (appearing first on the front cover, beckoning readers inside) functions as a familiar guide as it reappears throughout this first-rate collection.-Madeline Walton-Hadlock, San Jose Public Library, CA

School Library Journal

Flowing watercolors and charming rhymes in English and Spanish combine to convey the colors of the natural world with simple yet sophisticated grace. For the word "Blue" (written in that color) Lujan writes: "It's all in the sky, / except for those flowers / and that little girl's eyes." He repeats the verse in Spanish, sometimes with slightly different words: "El Azul / esta todo arriba, / salvo en unas flores / y en los ojos de una ni-a." An impressionistic blue wash, dotted with stalks of grass and wildflowers, depicts a little girl in a blue dress with a brown antelope beside a blue pool. This same antelope dances across many of the pages, which often also include birds, fish, flowers and trees in various colors. The imagery in both words and pictures is often richly original: "Into a tiny seed / fits clover, fits a tree, / fits the whole jungle . . . fits green." A lovely book to share, reflect upon and linger over. (Picture book. 3-8)

Kirkus Reviews