Along with her novels, Vlady Kociancich worked on a translation of Joseph Conrad’s The End of the Tether, which according to her obituary by Daniel Gigena in La Nación, “había sido muy elogiada” (was highly praised). This translation is present in The Eighth Wonder, explicitly given that the narrator is working on a translation of this book, as well as in more hidden forms.Article continues after advertisement
Alberto Paradella, the lawyer-turned-writer-turned-translator-turned-journalist-turned-scriptwriter at one point refers to the journey between the Spanish and English versions of the text he is working on as a “double itinerary”; the metaphor of the journey as a bidirectional translation, where the very process of moving alters the elements in movement, carries through the book in many ways. In the novel, Paradella cannot seem to finish the translation, due to distractions, heartbreaks, travels, and misplacements of the manuscript. In “real life,” Kociancich did finish the translation, which she worked on at the same time as she wrote The Eighth Wonder, and which was published as Con la soga al cuello by Emecé in an edition with a noose on the cover, later reprinted in an edition by Hyspamérica together with Sergio Pitol’s translation of El corazón de las tinieblas (Heart of Darkness) and a prologue by Jorge Luis Borges.
