Seite - 143 - in >mcs_lab> - Mobile Culture Studies, Band 2/2020

Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 6 2o20 (Travel) Birgit Englert | On the (Im)possibility of Writing a Travelogue 143 While the changes to the text were much less extensive than those that would be made to the 2010 version (appearing in the 2018 translation), major changes were made to the graphics. Ramos recounts: […] as the digitized diary pages mixed drawing and text in Portuguese, I thought it wouldn’t make sense either to keep them in Portuguese or to translate them into English. So, I simply deleted the text (with a few exceptions). Also, because of the way the book was produced in English, I could do there what I hadn’t been able to in the Portuguese versions, namely to keep the drawings near the text regardless of it being in black and white or in colour (the Portuguese versions include two eight-page colour sections). (Personal communication with Ramos, 20.9.2020) Ramos thinks of his sketches as desenhos, ‘drawings’, and notes that his books can be classified as belonging to the sub-discipline ‘graphic anthropology’, which is currently trending. He adds, though, that when he first worked on the book, he viewed it as ‘dialoguing with a particular tradition of writing in Ethiopian studies, very influenced by travel and exploration literature’, naming Marcel Griaule (Flambeurs d’hommes) and Hugo Pratt (‘who lived in Ethiopia as a kid’) as influences. He describes himself as having ‘consciously tried to bridge different genres: comics, travel writing/sketching, ethnographic account and folkloristic (the publishing of oral literature)’ (personal communication with Ramos, 27.9.2020). Dimensions of polygraphy in Ramos’s travel writing By the time the revised Portuguese version appeared in 2010, Ramos had made ‘at least fif- teen more trips to Ethiopia’ (Ramos 2018: v),11 yet he still re-published the book based on the sketches, notes, and interviews from his very first trip to Ethiopia in 1999. Over the years, he had accumulated numerous video and audio cassettes of recorded interviews, as well as hundreds of pages of transcriptions and translations. None of these additional insights or knowledge gained about Ethiopia feed into the revised or the translated versions of the book. On the one hand, Ramos (2018: v) displays a profound scepticism towards his own writing as a newcomer to a country when he notes in the preface that he ‘would not dare write like that’. On the other hand, he notes that although he took numerous journeys back to Ethiopia after the first, he doubts that including them would have made his account any ‘better’: The more I ask, the more information and memories I gather as I travel through the rural and urban world of northern Ethiopia, and the more churches, monasteries, tukuls (the round, thatched, mud built houses of the rural Amhara) and buna bets (‘coffee houses’) I can use as an excuse for being there, the more I feel unable to describe any of it. (Ramos 2018: v, italics in the original) The re-publishing of travelogues in other formats, referred to as polygraphy, is a common phe- nomenon in travel writing. Forsdick in fact proposes that we understand polygraphy as an inherent feature of travelogues, due to the travelogue’s complex genericity[, which] depends clearly on factors internal to the text itself, but is also related to additional and external aspects, associated with a textual self-relationality 11 This quote is taken from the preface to the English version (2018); however, it is a translation of a sentence that was also part of the preface of the 2010 version.