Gelasimov makes it look so easy. One moment you’ve sat down to Thirst, and the next you look up and time has passed and apparently you’ve swallowed the book whole. Thoughts about what it means to be maimed and images of a refrigerator full of vodka, flashbacks to an exploding APC, and little Nikita’s Superman toy are swirling in your head—and you’re smiling.

That was my experience when I first read Thirst in Russian, and that is precisely the experience I endeavored to capture for my reader. Critical to this was accurately conveying Gelasimov’s subtle depiction of Kostya’s ongoing adaptation to life as a man with no face—a freak—while telling a classic army-buddies-take-a-road-trip story through telling use of the spoken word—the conversations—and the unspoken word—thoughts.

Gelasimov sequences through sections about Kostya’s present—his personal trials, his search with his friends for their missing buddy, his interactions with both his neighbor Olga and her son Nikita and with his estranged father and his new family—and his past, not just the immediate past of his injury in Chechnya but his childhood and the story of his parents’ estrangement and divorce. Space breaks signal each shift, but so do the changes in vocabulary and register. A conversation between Kostya and his friends sounds very different from his conversation with his father, as well it should.

Kostya’s memories of his youth and his mother and father quarreling become impressionistic, and so does the language. He recalls a day at the beach when his father’s wandering eye spurs his mother’s jealousy:

Because those young women were there. And my father was playing with them.

The ball sails over our heads. Smack! A ringing blow. My eyes follow its flight. I hear them laughing. Once more—smack! Again I look up. The ball is turning into the sun, and I have tears streaming from my eyes. I can’t see a thing. Smack! Next to me someone screams, ‘Get out of the water! Come here this instant! What is that you have?’ Smack! ‘Throw that filth out this minute! You’re going to get it!’ Smack! ‘Catch it, catch it!’ Smack! And then two times quickly—smack! smack! But the sound is a little different and very close. ‘Did you get that?’ And in reply a child’s cry. ‘Don’t cry or you’ll get it again.’ Smack! . . .

The paragraph continues with that dual use of “smack”—for the ball and for the child—as we picture the swirl of the beach crowd, to cinematographic effect.

I’ve always hated folk sayings, with their easy dismissal of life’s many complexities. My least favorite is one I first heard tossed in my direction: “Guests are like fish; after three days they stink.” In my experience the opposite is true. Fish smells for the first three days, after which you either get used to it or the odor simply goes away. Like most New Yorkers, I don’t always have the patience (which we call “time”) to explain to visitors the ins and outs of my apartment and the city, and I dislike having to tiptoe past slumbering guests in the living room while on my way to work. Worse still are the early birds who interrupt my breakfast regimen of absolute silence and attempt, heaven help them, to start a conversation. But, after three days, this sense that my sacred space has been violated seems to dissipate, as the guests become adept at my rituals and I at theirs. Unfortunately most of them leave before we reach that point.

Translating a book can be like having a house guest who never leaves. I thought of this often when I was translating Quiet Chaos by Sandro Veronesi. A longer read, at 417 pages, than most of the previous works I had translated, it—or rather he—took up residence in my apartment for a good six months and came back for shorter stays of two to three weeks during the revision process. I kept him in the dining room and there he was, waiting for me every morning when I got up, eager to speak. All I really had to do was rub the sleep out of my eyes and, coffee mug in hand, sit down and prepare for a good listen. He was a delightful houseguest, and I fussed over him every day to make sure he had the right look, the right sound, and especially the right verve.

Quiet Chaos, in the grand tradition of Italian narrative (literature and film), is not so much about things happening as it is about stopping time in its tracks and nailing it to one place. After a momentous opening chapter when the narrator rescues a drowning woman only to learn when he gets home that his companion has suddenly died, the plot grinds to a halt. While other people’s words—of condolence, of comfort, even of confession—swirl around him, Pietro seeks a point of stillness. His inward turn is reflected in the language, consisting of long uninterrupted stream of consciousness passages, punctuated by abrupt intrusions from the outside world. He keeps waiting for grief to strike, unaware that he is living his life in its grip.