Translating Ethiopia: Language, Myth and Distortions

This section deals with travel writing in Ethiopia and crucial translational issues. It analyses shifts of descriptive focus in narrative structures, and dynamics of authenticity versus invention, due to language misinterpretations, cultural misconceptions and translation. The study sheds light on the first encounters with pre-colonial Ethiopia, and colonial conflicts in the ‘scramble for Africa’ (Pakenham, Youngs, Marsden). Mediation, translation and intertextuality range across the multilingual context of Abyssinia/Ethiopia, functioning as screens and filters in a country which has always been a matrix of marvels to Western minds. Notwithstanding advances in research, Ethiopia seems to have been neglected in the specific area of translation and travel studies, save for single sections in collected works or monographs covering a restricted historical period, and with a focus on East Africa (Mazrui 2016). Linguistic and ideological factors have shaped the representation of this part of East Africa as the place of the most intriguing myths of world literature, from the Queen of Sheba and Prester John to the Sacred Ark (Wallis Budge, Levine, Pankhurst, Carnochan, Munro-Hay), where the rhetoric of imperialism is reinforced by neo-colonial exploitation