“Translating History and Self-Translation: João Ubaldo Ribeiro’s Viva o povo brasileiro.”  Brasil/Brazil: A Journal of Brazilian Literature. November 12, 1994.

[Excerpt]

History-writing may, of course, also be thought of as a form of translation. Sir Walter Scott, for example, describes the process of constructing his paradigmatic texts of historical fiction as “translating into the manners as well as the language of the age we live in” (cited in Lukács, 68). Hayden white offers a more fully elaborated theoretical model of historiography as a tropological process of emplotment built on metaphor, metonym, synechdoche and irony. This theoretical description of historiography is virtually indistinguishable from similar theoretical considerations of translation, especially when one considers that the historical opposition in theories of translation – between the literal and verifiable and the fictional or interpretive – is identical to the historical opposition one finds in theories of historiography. (from p. 32-3)