6BC Botanical Garden
presents
Isabel Fargo Cole
reading from
All the Roads Are Open by Annemarie Schwarzenbach
Saturday, June 15 at 3pm
(rain date: Sunday, June 16 at 3pm)
Please come to a reading from All the Roads Are Open by Annemarie Schwarzenbach by Berlin-based translator Isabel Fargo Cole. Cole will introduce the work and have time for discussion.
About the book:
In 1939, two women traveled by car from Geneva through the Balkans and Turkey to Afghanistan. Annemarie Schwarzenbach was a writer from Zürich, an anti-Fascist, a lesbian, and a morphine addict fleeing from her inner torments and from Europe’s destructive political climate. Ella Maillart was a photographer, sportswoman and ethnologist from Geneva, planning to study the customs of the mysterious valley of Kafiristan. Upon their arrival in Kabul in late August 1939, news of the outbreak of World War II disrupted their plans and tested their friendship. Ella Maillart’s 1947 account of the journey, The Cruel Way, has long stood as a classic of travel literature. Annemarie Schwarzenbach’s literary and journalistic work was rediscovered in Europe in the 1980s and is now being translated into English for the first time. Her essays from the Afghanistan journey (All the Roads Are Open) were translated by Isabel Fargo Cole for Seagull Books in 2011.
