ABSTRACT
In Brazil, João Ubaldo Ribeiro is the best known case of self-translation to date. He translated two of his novels into English: Sargento Getúlio (1971) / Sergeant Getúlio (1978) and Viva o povo brasileiro (1984) / An invincible memory (1989). The purpose of this article is to discuss the author’s attitudes and opinions about his (self)translation taking as a starting point his explanations issued in an e-mail interview. The examination of this personal archive illuminates an unclear and rarely investigated process. For this purpose, I present the e-mail interview conducted between 2003 and 2007, a period during which I sent the writer one e-mail per week and obtained answers to questions about his work of self-translation, among other topics. Among other interesting attitudes and opinions, João Ubaldo presents the “foreignized language” as a translation strategy.
KEYWORDS:
self-translation; self-translation studies; translation studies