Casca is Michael Wooff’s translation of Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer’s La tía Casca, from Cartas desde mi celda, first published in 1864. Set among the mountains of Aragón, the story recounts the fate of Casca, the witch of Trasmoz, and the violent folklore that has grown around her death.
Bécquer places a cultivated traveller’s scepticism beside a shepherd’s absolute belief in witchcraft, curses and damnation. As the landscape darkens and the tale unfolds, reason begins to lose some of its certainty. In Wooff’s translation, the atmosphere and rhythm of Bécquer’s nineteenth-century prose carry that uneasy movement between superstition and disbelief into English.