Death in Persia

Annemarie Schwarzenbach

Translated by Lucy Renner Jones

With an Afterword by Roger Perret

 

5 x 8 inches, 156pp. June 2013

ISBN : 9780857420893

Rs  395.00 (HB)
$15.00 (HB)
£9.50 (HB)

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Since the rediscovery of her work in the late 1980s, Annemarie Schwarzenbach—journalist, traveler, archaeologist, opium addict, and antifascist novelist—has become a European cult figure among free spirited bohemians.

 

Available in English for the first time and beautifully translated by Lucy Renner Jones, Death in Persia is a collage of the political and the private, documenting Schwarzenbach’s intimate feelings and public ideas during four trips to Persia between 1933 and 1939. From her reflections on individual responsibility in the lead-up to World War II to her reactions to accusations from her friends of having deserted Europe and the antifascist cause for Tehran, Schwarzenbach recorded a great deal about daily life in Persia, and, most personally, her ill-fated love affair with Jalé, the daughter of the Turkish ambassador.

 

Chronologically preceding Schwarzenbach’s exquisite travelogue All the Roads are Open, an account of her automobile journey from Geneva to Afghanistan in 1939, Death in Persia is the enthralling diary of an astute observer standing at the crossroads of major events in history and a gorgeous new addition to Annemarie Schwarzenbach’s growing English-language oeuvre. 

Annemarie Schwarzenbach (1908–42) was a writer, journalist and photographer, who worked periodically as an archaeologist. She is the author of the poem Aus Tétouan, Der Krater der Tiere, Das Wunder des Baumes.

 

Lucy Renner Jones is a freelance translator living in Berlin.

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