Literary translation theory reclaims “untranslatables” (Apter, 2013, Lezra, 2017) as Google promises to bridge the gap between human and machine (Wu et al, 2016). Surveying recent developments in translation theory and machine translation, I reread Roberto Arlt’s Los siete locos (1929) and Los lanzallamas (1931) through the prism of translation, focusing on how translation machines and machine translation operate within the novel to offer a different interpretation of its ending.