Page - 142 - in >mcs_lab> - Mobile Culture Studies, Volume 2/2020

142 Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 6 2o20 (Travel) Birgit Englert | On the (im)possibility of writing a travelogue of two sketches that instead emphasize the travelogue dimension of the book: the image on the upper half of the cover shows a donkey and two people, presumably peasants, standing in a rather dry-looking landscape. They are looked at from a distance, possibly from a moving vehicle. The image on the lower half of the cover, separated from the upper half by the subtitle, depicts a scene from inside a vehicle. There are five people sitting in the back seat; the one in the left corner, holding a notebook in his hand, can be recognized as the author — the only self-portrait in the book.10 The 2018 edition contains a preface and an introduction, in which the author reflects on the earlier versions and his reasons for publishing this revised and translated version. The first part of the book takes the form of a travelogue in a more conventional sense and is accordingly titled ‘An Ethiopian Travelogue’ (p. 29–118), whereas the second part of the book contains a more ethnographic account of Ramos’s fieldwork, featuring oral history and oral stories. This part, titled ‘Ethiopian Stories’ (p. 119–204), is only marginally discussed below, as is the film Gondari Vocies — Legends from Northern Ethiopia, which is included in the book in the form of a link, and which Ramos edited specifically for the 2018 version on the basis of material filmed in 1999. In the preface, Ramos (2018: v–vi) reflects on what had pushed him to produce the speed- ily-written first publication and his ambivalent feelings about the result. The revision in 2010 was driven by a desire to remedy the incompleteness of the first version: In 2010, I changed quite a few paragraphs and sentences of the first part[,] and in the second part I restructured the stories, [added] new ones and wrote all the bridging texts (absent in the 2000 version). For the 2018 version, I again revised the text, corrected sentences, and of course altered the transcribed spelling of Ethiopian names and toponyms. (Personal communication with Ramos, 20.9.2020) 10 The 2000 book features an urban scene, while the cover of the 2010 book has no sketches on it at all. Fig. 1–3: Book covers of the first (Ramos 2000) and second (Ramos 2010) editions in Portuguese and the English translation (Ramos 2018) [from left to right]