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144 Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 6 2o20 (Travel) Birgit Englert | On the (im)possibility of writing a travelogue that might be classed “polygraphy”, that is the tendency of certain travel writers to re-textualise or rewrite their journeys, over a long period, in multiple forms. (Forsdick 2009: 294) The practice of polygraphy is often connected to the commercialization of travel writing. Nev- ertheless, travel writers may have other reasons to reproduce their journeys in different forms, as Kennedy (2019: 200) stresses. This also applies to Ramos, who revised his quickly published travelogue in order to deal with the insufficiencies he himself perceived in the first version and revised it again in connection with its translation into English. The continuous re-writing of a specific journey has been interpreted as a way to continue one’s travelling, as Forsdick argues with regard to the example of polygraphy practiced by Ella Maillart. The importance of a specific journey to a travel writer’s development is made clear through polygraphic practice ‘and the way in which physical return fails to curtail the reper- cussions of a specific itinerary on memory and the imaginary with which it is associated’ (cf. Forsdick 2009: 301).12 The desire not to let go of this formative first trip to Ethiopia is certainly also at play with Ramos, who is aware of the incompleteness of the first, quickly published book but nevertheless chooses to rework it twice without adding any sketches, observations, or stories from later journeys — experiences from later travels which nevertheless had an impact on his revision of the book. As indicated in the introduction, I propose that we understand the concept of polygraphy as extending to the relation that holds between the text and the visual within a single publica- tion, which I have called ‘internal polygraphy’. I wish to use this term to refer to travelogues in which different ways of communicating the same journey stand separately alongside each other, although they are interwoven in a single book. In the case of Ramos’s Ethiopian ‘travelogue’, these take the form of a written text on the one hand and sketches on the other (cf. Topping’s (2009) discussion of Nicolas Bouvier’s oeuvre, which consists of textual as well as photographic representations of Asia that were produced as distinct narratives by Bouvier, although they were brought together in a single book as the result of editorial decisions). Ramos resorts to this form of polygraphy as a means of creating a travelogue that offers his readers a more complete experience of his journey to Ethiopia, allowing them to share in his amazement, confusion and other emotions, which he does not want to explain but which are revealed in his sketches. Ramos aims to describe his travels without pretending that he holds any authoritative knowledge of the places he has travelled to. As Kennedy (2019: 200) reminds us, polygraphy is well suited to revealing the elusive char- acter of knowledge in the context of travel writing: Overall, the concept of “polygraphy” sums up the epistemological image of travel writing and high- lights many of the ethical dilemmas of the genre. It reminds us that while knowledge seems to be promised to the reader it is, in fact, elusive and highly unstable. Travel writing can only ever be a rep- resentation of other peoples and cultures; a single, “true” account of any journey is an impossibility. In this sense, certain dimensions of polygraphy can be viewed as prerequisites for a travelogue’s being able to show awareness of its own ‘impossibility’. Ramos (2018: 6) himself describes the bal- ance between the ‘text’ that his sketches constitute and his written text when he notes the following: 12 Maillart ‘favours a flânerie that constantly defers the journey’s end. Rewriting becomes a means of such prolon- gation […]’ (cf. Forsdick 2009: 300).