Stella N’Djoku is a Swiss poet, journalist, presenter, and educator of Italian and Congolese heritage. These two poems, forthcoming in her second poetic collection, were translated from the Italian by Julia Anastasia Pelosi-Thorpe. The original Italian follows the English translation.
They’re still the same
roads — red all over — red as ever.
I’d hoped to find you underneath this rain.
— tell me, how’s life? Treating u ok? —
All this good baffles me,
this scarce-
arriving autumn.
All summer’s
colours are still here
but the apples’
red will come soon.
Do you ever feel it’s time to leave
to come back?
Le vie sono rimaste quelle
le stesse — tutte rosse — come sempre.
Speravo di trovarti sotto questa pioggia
— dimmi, come va? Ti conviene? —
Mi rende confusa tutto questo bene,
come questo autunno
che stenta ad arrivare.
Ci sono ancora tutti
i colori dell’estate
eppure non manca molto al rosso
delle mele.
Pensi mai che è ora di partire
di tornare?
~
My favourite saint shares your name
as do some countries that don’t
border ours.
Our borders shift continually,
like constellations and each molecule
whose distance I come to hand-calculate,
the same ones looking to remind me
of our bodies’ promises
we never managed to keep.
Il mio santo preferito porta il tuo nome
come anche qualche paese che non confina
con il nostro.
Si spostano continuamente i nostri confini,
come le costellazioni e tutte le molecole
di cui passo a calcolare le distanze con le spanne,
queste stesse che cercano di ricordare
le promesse dei corpi
che noi non siamo riusciti a mantenere.
About the Author
Stella N’Djoku is a Swiss poet, journalist, presenter, and educator of Italian and Congolese heritage. Her work is widely published in online literary magazines and the anthologies Abitare la parola: Poeti nati negli anni Novanta (Ladolfi, 2019) and Dal sottovuoto: poesie assetate d’aria (Samuele Editore, 2020). Her debut collection is Comet (Il tempo di una cometa, Edizioni Ensemble, 2019), the majority of which has appeared in English in journals such as The Poetry Review, The Hopkins Review, Asymptote, and Gulf Coast. N’Djoku’s poems have also been translated from Italian into French, German, Spanish, and Portuguese. She is currently completing a PhD in Philosophy at the Università della Svizzera Italiana, organises cultural events, and works with the Italian-language Swiss public broadcasting organisation RSI and the Italian WebRadioGiardino. N’Djoku speaks regularly at European literary festivals and has taught religious studies and creative writing. She is at work on her second collection and can be found at stellandjoku.wordpress.com.
About the Translator
Julia Anastasia Pelosi-Thorpe‘s translations of Latin, Italian, and Friulian/Parmesan Dialect texts appear in the Journal of Italian Translation, Asymptote, the Chicago Review, the Poetry Review, A Public Space, and other literary magazines. She can be found at jpelosithorpe.com.
