Following my BA in English Literature at the University of Manchester, I received full funding from the Modern Languages and Cultures Departmental Studentship to continue for an MA there, specialising in translation theory and the work of Jorge Luis Borges. My DPhil is supported by the Queen's College and the faculty in the form of the Cyril Vysove Scholarship.

My project will examine the twin-corpus of two 'cosmopolitan' author-translators of the twentieth century, Jorge Luis Borges and Javier Marías, to argue for the centrality of translation in their stylistic trajectories. Literary translation studies has become so invested in a concept of translation as 'cultural transposition', or a covert scene of ideological intervention, that it risks forgetting the linguistic ‘problem’ which first brought translation to our interest: its technical impossibility.  

Translation is an encounter which disrupts our most basic assumptions about literary influence. It is simple enough to observe that a writer 'finds inspiration' in the authors he once translated (whether out of interest, or for the extra income), importing their characters, images, and tropes into his own fictional world. But what facilitates stylistic change, I argue, are the traces of a linguistic violence which his translations first made necessary, the discomfort of a target language bending and stretching to accommodate a strange and incompatible source. As I wish to demonstrate, it is only when they tries to force this marriage that these writers realise the flexibility of the Spanish language, which might then be exploited in narratives projects of their own.

Publications

 ‘Anglophilia and Excess in “El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan”’, Variaciones Borges, 58 (2024), pp. 199–220. Winner of the Society for Latin American Studies Masters Prize, 2024. JSTOR.

Translations

Itziar Gúzman and Andrea Aguilar, To the Glasshouse (Madrid: This Side Up, 2025). URL.

Conference Papers

“Montañas Nevadas”: trauma textual en un himno de mujer.’ ‘Violencias y emociones en la historia del tiempo presente’, HISTEMAL – Instituto Mora (virtual), 20 June 2024.

‘Anglophone Subtexts and the Problem of ‘Excess’ in “El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan”’, ‘CLACS Symposium in Latin American and Caribbean Studies,’ University of Manchester, 4 June 2024.

Research Interests

Translation theory and practice, Jorge Luis Borges, philology, linguistic philosophy, transatlantic criticism, Modernism(s), the Spanish Civil War/Postwar, deconstruction.