The paper tells of the experience of translating the novel Zone by Mathias Enard, published in Italian in 2008. The difficulty of transposing this work into another language stems firstly from the extreme structure of the work itself, as the novel consists of a single sentence 517 pages long. Other difficulties arise at the moment of interpreting the content: in particular, extralinguistic references are found throughout the novel which, while obvious to the French reader, are obscure to readers belonging to other cultures. Along the lines of Antoine Berman, the author firmly believes that translating is fist a matter of opening oneself to the Other, listening, at length, to the voice of that “other” language that each author constructs within his or her native tongue. The translator must also possess the willingness to embrace another cultural horizon and to accompany the reader along a path of understanding, a path not devoid of unknown factors, but one along which discovery itself becomes the reader’s reward.