Translating Ethiopia

Book excerpt: The book represents the first in a series on travel writing, translation, tourism, and advertising. It spans biblical narratives, religious missions, scientific explorations, and the lesser known travels in Ethiopia (Prester John, Queen of Sheba, the Ark of the Covenant, the Blue Nile, Maq’dala, Lalibela and Gondar). In particular, stemming from the cultural turn in translation studies and geography, this work adopts a comparative and diachronic perspective on colonial and postcolonial descriptions of space and place, examining the variation in intertextual citation and re-writing, from early accounts to contemporary travelogues, marking a persistence in stereotyping.