In addition to writing novels, Vlady Kociancich undertook a translation of Joseph Conrad’s The End of the Tether, a project noted in her obituary by Daniel Gigena in La Nación as having “been widely praised.” This translation appears in The Eighth Wonder, where it is explicitly framed as the narrator wrestling with a translation of the same work, and it surfaces in subtler, less obvious ways as well.
Alberto Paradella, a lawyer who became a writer, translator, journalist, and screenwriter at various points, describes the movement between the Spanish and English versions of the text he is handling as a “double itinerary.” The image of a journey as a translation that moves in both directions—where the act of shifting from one language into another reshapes the elements in transit—threads through the novel in numerous ways. In Paradella’s fictional account, the process stalls: the translation never reaches completion because of interruptions, heartbreak, travel, and misplaced manuscripts. In the real world, Kociancich did complete her own translation while writing The Eighth Wonder, and it appeared as Con la soga al cuello from Emecé, a edition bearing a noose on the cover, later reissued by Hyspamérica together with Sergio Pitol’s translation of El corazón de las tinieblas (Heart of Darkness) and a prologue by Jorge Luis Borges.
There are several Spanish renderings of The End of the Tether—En las últimas, Situación límite, El cabo de la cuerda—yet Kociancich’s title Con la soga al cuello, which more literally could be read as With the Rope Around the Neck, remains my preferred choice. It tweaks Conrad’s title just a touch, much as Borges’ Otra vuelta de tuerca (Another Turn of the Screw) modifies Henry James’s novella.
Which leads me to wonder: perhaps Paradella did finish the translation after all. The entire arc of The Eighth Wonder might be interpreted as Kociancich’s own translation of Conrad’s The End of the Tether taken to an extreme. The translator has entered so deeply into the source that what is translated becomes not only words and ideas, but scenes and atmospheres, so the book travels from the colonial milieu of Singapore to the contemporary landscape of Buenos Aires. This is not simply “rewriting.” The frenetic movement of The End of the Tether—its crossings of land and sea, its English boardinghouses and Malaysian coastlines, its fleeting ports and the only home being the vessel itself—parallels the Argentine travel journalist’s own odyssey from Villa del Parque to the bustle of Berlin, with layovers at airports where books and dreams stand in for a home. Movement itself becomes the sole constant, until there is no return or even a sense of home that can be found again.
There is disquiet in the absorption that translation requires, the way the self enters another world at the possible expense of the current one.
An endless journey, an itinerary from which there is no escape, perhaps a synonym for a nightmare. Or, in Conrad’s words: “Captain Whalley, substantial and dignified, left well-nigh alone in the vast hotel by each light-hearted skurry, felt more and more like a stranded tourist with no aim in view, like a forlorn traveler without a home.” From Conrad’s The End of the Tether through Kociancich’s La soga al cuello and La octava maravilla, to this translation, The Eighth Wonder—the path itself has been a journey, with countless possibilities.
In a conversation with Silvina Friera for Página/12, Kociancich reflected:
Quería incorporar la idea de que todos vivimos traduciendo la realidad, traduciendo a las otras personas, aunque nunca vas a conocer a alguien enteramente. Traduje una de las más hermosas novelas de Joseph Conrad, The End of the Tether, hice toda esa experiencia porque no estaba escribiendo ficción. Al traducir a Conrad, a quien venero, me di cuenta de que tenía que conseguir el tono de la prosa de Conrad. Lo que me quedó fue la experiencia de que realmente estaba traduciendo, dando una versión, porque, lo mismo en la vida, hay sentimientos que son intraducibles.
(I wanted to incorporate the idea that all of us live translating reality, translating other people, even if it’s never possible to know somebody completely. I translated one of the most beautiful novels by Joseph Conrad, The End of the Tether, I went through that whole experience because I wasn’t writing fiction. While translating Conrad, whom I venerated, I realized that I had to achieve the tone of Conrad’s prose. What stays with me from that experience is that I was translating in the full sense, giving my own version, because just as in life, there are sentiments that are untranslatable.)
The Eighth Wonder embodies both dimensions—cinema and voyage—because cinema, in essence, is a journey, and a journey constitutes the core of cinema. They inhabit time and space, yet beyond the moment in which they occur, they lack reality of their own.
–Vlady Kociancich, The Eighth Wonder
Whalley could relive his entire life’s romance, idyll, and sorrow in a half hour of solitary reflection.
–Joseph Conrad, The End of the Tether
The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World—Giza’s Great Pyramid, Rhodes’ Colossus, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Lighthouse of Alexandria, Halicarnassus’s Mausoleum, Olympia’s Zeus, and the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus—were those recognized by Herodotus. In this novel, the eighth wonder stands for both the journey and the cinema. They are all-consuming forces, modes of movement that reshape the mind. The seventh art, cinema, alongside the seven global wonders, might be seen as a parallel to the seventh note on a musical scale, a peak of tension before the eighth begins another octave.
I am drawn to the Spanish expression “me paso la película”—“I see it as if it were a film”—which captures that moment when everything flashes through one’s mind as if it has already happened. There is a pleasure in this capacity for fantasy, in watching everything at once. It resembles a posthumous dream-like state in which the future is projected, and the seeds of the present are cultivated into a narrative arc, whether joyous or tragic, with both laughter and sorrow, as the salsa singer Héctor Lavoe would say. The phrase embodies a paradox: depending on how it’s used, it can indicate either bliss or catastrophe. “Me paso la película” might apply to romance, obsession, or the fear of a catastrophe. The ability to imagine encompasses all possibilities.
Now let us move to a specific film example. The short 1978 documentary Borges para millones opens with the act of filming itself, revealing its own process, before abruptly cutting to a Technicolor Borges seated in a chair, his skin waxy, features carved, speaking rapidly in a mechanical cadence as if reciting lines a million times. He claims that typical Argentines come from everywhere—“fácilmente cosmopolitos”—and should therefore read everything, live every experience, “no negarnos a nada.” He mentions that he is currently learning Icelandic. The documentary presents Borges as an endless traveler, a mythical public figure; it recalls his childhood’s endless mirrors, his poetry, and a life in which literature is pursued through the imagination. Buenos Aires streets appear in faded yellow, including an inner patio with a palm tree.
Borges was not merely a secluded poet—despite spending long hours poring over Rafael Cansinos-Asséns’s translation of The Thousand and One Nights and the writings of Macedonio Fernández, among many other works, while contributing to the magazine Sur and serving at the Biblioteca Nacional. His father’s death marked him deeply; the rain in “La lluvia” returns as a memory:
Porque ya cae la lluvia
minuciosa. Cae o cayó. La lluvia
es una cosa
