Tierra Narrative

Excited to share this editorial project that has been published digitally by Fence Magazine today: a folio of works by six women writers from El Salvador, spanning the years of the Salvadoran civil war through the present. “I celebrate my permanence in the eye of the beast” features works by Lourdes Ferrufino, Ana Maria Rivas, Jacinta Escudos, Krisma Mancia, Lauri Garcia Dueñas, and Amada Libertad. These translations are––of no small significance––thanks to the work of three translators of Salvadoran heritage: Nestor Gomez, Alexandra Lytton Regalado, and Yvette Siegert.

These works are extraordinary. They span combatant poetry, short story, and lyrical monuments of endurance. As we share in our introductory note, these writers share a lineage of sybilic protest in the face of social abjection in El Salvador. And these texts and translations exist as women and gender minorities continue to resist state oppression in the present, from ongoing gender violence and strictures on reproductive rights to the collateral effects of the nation’s current state of exception.

Some context: in 2022, by invitation of poet and guest editor-in-chief Edgar Garcia, Óscar Moisès Díaz and Maryam Ivette Parhizkar agreed to rep Tierra Narrative as co-editors of Fence’s inaugural translation section. (While Fence has long included translation in its capacious curation of writing along and against the grain, this was the first time in its two-decade history that the journal has had a dedicated translation section.) This digital folio is cleaved out of our first print issue, to feature these works more expansively.

If you read, engage, and/or circulate this work: we are honored. Likewise, if you include it in your teaching, or share it with students, community members, and/or colleagues who would find something in it.

Our immense gratitude to the poets, translators, estates, and editors for entrusting us with their language. To Edgar, managing editors Emily Wallis Hughes and Jason Zuzga, digital editor Nik Slackman, and the rest of the Fence team for making room for the work. And to artist Myra Barraza, whose 2008 drawing, El sueño de la razón, graces the introductory page.