And This April in the Sky
Thank you for this little house
four walls five windows
and this April in the sky
He’s gone at twenty-eight. Cancer. Stage four by the time he found out.
For his final gigs, he slaps Pierrot makeup all over his face and puts on a robe that makes him into a harlequin (if he may say so himself). He can’t bear anyone looking him in the eye.
He goes to die at his parents’ place. It’s the decent thing to do: it only makes sense that he’d want a proper farewell. He was born in a microscopic village that got annexed to Ukraine through the gears of bureaucracy. A real godforsaken place. That’s what he left Moscow for; up-and-coming, economic-boom Moscow. Imagine that.
It’s only when I get there that I learn he has a wife. That he has a son. That she’s young; a child in appearance if not in age.
It’s the dead of winter, minus 20 or thereabouts. There isn’t a single car on the streets. No heating in people’s homes. This teeny tiny girl keeps slapping her arms to keep warm, and doesn’t ever ask why I came.
Here’s why I came: to fax his diagnoses to Moscow’s luminaries and quasi-Western private clinics.
My family sets three different knives on the lunch table. I know what sort of butter works best with every type of caviar, and I know the appropriate ratio of butter to caviar that goes on a slice of bread. I am that up-and-coming Moscow he came from.
I produced his last three albums. They’re dedicated to me, he made them for me.
(I came to save him. I can afford to try.)
When I met him, he was already having affairs. All shameless, all public. And I wonder, how does it feel? To marry a guy and never see him again. To have him and keep losing him, like a vow dissolving into vapour: enormous and empty, pure and futile, unspeakably sacred.
What part of him could she lay claim to, anyway? A boy of seventeen, yearning to leave? Or this relic, this broken man, who truly believes now is the time to come back to this place?
And yet, she does have a point. This shabby provincial girl, wearing flimsy slippers and a jacket that barely holds together, showing me around her shithole of a hometown. This girl who dreams of a fur coat. I tell her they’ve gone out of style in Moscow: we all travel in big, black heated cars these days, all dressed up in our evening wear.
She doesn’t say a word. She doesn’t cry, she doesn’t yell at me, she doesn’t ask how I dare say “evening wear” so casually. She doesn’t call me names, and she still asks no questions.
Dull, already withering at twenty-four, barely educated, she’s so damn right about everything that I walk out while he’s still breathing. I forfeit the game, give up the advantage, stuff the doctors’ paperwork back in my bag.
My grandmother was a nuclear engineer, the first woman to become a nuclear engineer in all of Russia. She used to tell me that I was magnificent. That I was exceptional. That people like us don’t compare ourselves to ordinary folk: that’s in poor taste. I was never taught about guilt, and I was never taught how to apologise.
Sometimes, late in the evening, I listen to the songs he used to sing with that sideways glance of his. I was never taught how full lives lived in tight spaces can be, even when they seem empty.
Translator’s Note:
The grief that underpins every word, and the desperate urgency it propels the narrator with, is the aspect of Stella Poli’s short story “E nel cielo l’aprile” (And This April in the Sky) that immediately drew me in as a reader. On the face of it, this is the voice of a woman who can’t bear to lose a companion to a cruel illness, and is prepared to sacrifice time and money to the near impossible task of saving him. Bewildered, numbed by the magnitude of her loss, generous with the resources at her disposal. But so much more is happening here.
As a flash fiction writer, I have a deep appreciation for stories that pack a lot of meaning in a short space, and stay with readers long enough to keep them asking questions after reading the last word. In this case, “long enough” meant translating for two years, with long breaks between drafts. Each time I went back to the original text, I noticed new and different layers beneath the lines. A pettier, less benevolent protagonist began to take shape. I saw the stubbornness of the wealthy woman who refuses to accept there are illnesses she cannot cure with money. I heard the embittered ex-lover’s voice, dripping with disdain for the places and people her loved one came from and chose to return to, even though those places and people made him into the man she can’t bear losing. And I glimpsed someone unpleasant, ominous, subtly threatening: the privileged daughter of a neo-imperialist state, staking a claim on her lover’s art, exerting a dominance she never before had reasons to question.
This is the first translated short fiction piece I’ve submitted to a magazine. I shared my first draft in a small online workshop, as part of a literary translation course with Jen Calleja in 2024. I credit the course with giving me the confidence to trust my instinct and my experience of the English I speak, read and write—for example, when they suggest rhythm, verb tense, or sentence structure choices that look like departures from the source language. In a happy coincidence, I read Jen’s book, Fair—The Life And Art Of Translation, right as I was working on what felt like the most evident departure in this story: the final sentence.
My first draft of it was a straightforward, almost-literal translation (“My grandmother never taught me how full the small things really are, even when they look empty.”) I kept it like that for a long time; but I sensed there was something I was overlooking—a shade of meaning I could no longer disguise with subtext once I’d glimpsed it. For the line to really land in English, for the wave of grief to wash over the narrator, I (as a reader, as a writer) needed her to name those “small things” she’d spent all her life diminishing; to admit, at last, that other people’s lives are every bit as real as her own.
For all this to translate into the sentence you’re reading, I had to argue with an inner voice that gets particularly strong when I’m writing. A voice that usually yells: “How dare you?” Yes, how dare I take liberties with something as crucial as a story’s ending? I almost gave in to that voice; then, I came across this quote in Fair:
“I sometimes imagine that at the start or end of every line in my translations, it says: ‘I’m pretty sure they’re saying’, or ‘…I reckon’ … I’m not the author, and even the author isn’t always sure what they meant, or sure of all the influences on what they’ve expressed.”
Coming from an experienced translator I admire, it comforted me, and made me feel less alone in my process and choices for this piece. The (inner and outer) world this story takes place in, the way I see it, the way the author’s words shaped it in my mind. It makes me wonder: what will you see?
Stella Poli is a postdoctoral research fellow in Italian Linguistics at University of Pavia. She teaches Contemporary Poetry, Editing and Writing at IULM University. She obtained a PhD in Contemporary Philology at University of Genova, discussing a thesis on Literary Translation. Her research interests focus on archives, translation and contemporary literature and poetry. She is editor of Trasparenze, Configurazioni, La Balena Bianca, and Nuova Tèchne. She has written many short stories, for Italian literary reviews, such as ‘tina, malgrado le mosche, L’inquieto, Rivista Blam, Turchese, Topsy Kretts, and more. Her first novel, La gioia avvenire, was shortlisted by Premio Calvino in 2022, and then published by Mondadori in 2023.
Federica Silvi is an Italian writer and translator based in London. She has published flash fiction and creative nonfiction in Identity Theory, Temple in a City, Major 7th Magazine, Memoir Mixtapes, Visual Verse, and more. Her first published literary translation piece, an extract from Olga Campofreda’s award-nominated 2023 novel Ragazze perbene, appeared in Asymptote in 2025. For infrequent social media appearances, find her on Bluesky as @edgwareviabank.
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