Photograph by Christina Duan
is a writer and literary translator based in New York City. ✽
I graduated from Columbia University with a bachelor's degree in Comparative Literature and Society, and I’ve interned at The Paris Review.
I am currently pursuing a MSt in Comparative Literature and Critical Translation at the University of Oxford as a Clarendon scholar. I will subsequently pursue a Ph.D. in Latin American and Iberian Cultures at Columbia University.
I've conducted research in the classroom and beyond on medieval & early modern Iberian and French lyric poetry, translation theory, contemporary debates in the art world, and Puerto Rican literature and politics. I'm always looking for new interdisciplinary projects to take on and initiatives to support, particularly those that uplift Latinx voices. Other interests include drawing, book-making & publishing, graphic design & illustration, video games, and arts criticism.
📞787-579-0042
I offer freelance literary translation services in addition to working under contract at the Latin American and Iberian Cultures department’s imprint Sundial House.
University of Arizona Press, Tucson, AZ (Spring 2024)
WINNER OF THE 2023 AMBROGGIO PRIZE, GIVEN BY THE ACADEMY OF AMERICAN POETS
Aflame with desire, the eye conjures, dreams, invents itself, sees what it wants. The eye sees what it is able to see. Ojo en celo / Eye in Heat brings into sharp relief the limits of our gaze. It shows us what it is to escape the mirror and move beyond mirages. Margarita Pintado Burgos invites us to ponder the impasse while showing us ways to see better, to break the habit of lying, and to confront images along with language.
With devastating clarity, Pintado Burgos’s poems, presented in both Spanish and English, give voice to the world within and beyond sight: the plants, the trees, the birds, the ocean waves, the fruit forgotten in the kitchen, the house’s furniture. Light takes on new dimensions to expose, manipulate, destroy, and nourish. Alejandra Quintana Arocho’s sensitive English translation renders the stark force of these poems without smoothing over the language of the original.
Sundial House, Columbia University*, New York City* (Fall 2023)
I’m cotranslating into English a centennial edition of Chilean poet/teacher Gabriela Mistral’s first volume, Desolación (1922), as part of Sundial House’s new series aiming to amplify contemporary, overlooked Latinx and Caribbean voices in their original languages and in translation. I’ve consulted the Columbia University Libraries and Barnard Archives collections on Mistral, reviewing and analyzing the dominant threads in the extensive scholarship written about her life and her work to problematize the way Mistral has been studied—as a saintly, national Chilean symbol—and to present a new, more creative approach towards understanding and translating elements of her poetry previously relegated to the margins, including her queerness and treatment of the female gaze, desire, and body.