Alejandra Camila Quintana Arocho

Alejandra is a Ph.D. student in Latin American and Iberian Cultures at Columbia University and is also pursuing a Graduate Certificate in Comparative Literature and Society. They hold a B.A. in Comparative Literature and Society from Columbia University and a MSt in Comparative Literature and Critical Translation from the University of Oxford, which they attended as a Clarendon scholar. Between her undergraduate and graduate studies, Alejandra worked at The Paris Review as an editorial intern, fact-checking and proofreading interviews, stories, and poems for the quarterly. She is also a literary translator from the Spanish. Alongside Jack Rockwell and Milena Sanabria Contreras, she recently cotranslated The Art of Fiction No. 264 with Javier Cercas, which was featured in The Paris Review’s No. 249, Fall 2024 issue.

Her research focuses on medieval and early modern Iberian multilingual and translated texts, applying lenses like translation theory and cognitive linguistics to analyze conceptions of literary authorship and authority. She has sought to reimbue the role of the translator with textual agency and innovation, observing how the process of translation is steeped in and informs scholarly methods of constructing literary authority. Most recently, she has analyzed the work of authors across the medieval and early modern Mediterranean like Christine de Pizan and El Mancebo de Arévalo from the perspective of translation studies.

Alejandra is broadly interested in texts that cross or contest multiple linguistic and geographical borders and that bring into question the division between “original” and “translation.” They are particularly invested in translating poetry by overlooked and contemporary writers from the Caribbean and its diasporas. They translated Puerto Rican poet Margarita Pintado Burgos’s Ojo en celo / Eye In Heat (University of Arizona Press, 2024), which won the 2023 Ambroggio Prize given by the Academy of American Poets. She’s also been involved with Sundial House at LAIC since its inception, having collaborated on a centennial bilingual edition of Gabriela Mistral’s Desolación (1922), alongside Inés Bellina, Anne Freeland, and Sundial’s founding editor Eunice Rodríguez Ferguson.