The first Portuguese translation of a narrative collected in Kimbundu was produced by the writer Ladislau Batalha (1856-1939). It is the story of a man who hears the voice of the fish king, a narrative present in Afro-Brazilian oral tradition, which we shall discuss later, and one of the two short stories recorded by Chatelain in an appendix to his Kimbundu Grammar. At the end of the book, A língua de Angola, published in Lisbon in 1897 (nine years after Chatelain's publication of the Kimbundu folk tale), Batalha includes three short stories from the Bantu oral tradition, 'collected from modern travellers to these territories' (Batalha, 1891, p. 19). One of these is also presented in Kimbundu, followed by Batalha's 'free translation' into Lusitanian Portuguese (Batalha, 1891, pp. 58-60). The Kimbundu version published by Batalha is almost identical to the version initially published by Chatelain in the appendix to his Kimbundu Grammar and reprinted in his Folk-Tales of Angola, published as a Kimbundu-English bilingual volume in 1894. The only differences we can observe between the two texts are in the spelling of certain words. Although he does not mention the Swiss researcher in his introductory text, the Portuguese writer makes several references to Héli Chatelain throughout his book, which would appear to reinforce the hypothesis that the Kimbundu folk tale was reproduced (and translated) from the initial record made by Chatelain. The translation of Chatelain's collection into Portuguese, for which he collaborated with the Brazilian author Camara Cascudo (1898-1986), was only published 70 years after his first edition. The book, entitled Contos populares de Angola, was published in Lisbon by Agência-Geral do Ultramar in 1964.  
In Brazil, right from the time of the earliest collections of oral narratives, African traditions stand out as a strong component of the country's oral literature. Sílvio Romero (1851-1914), the great research pioneer and author  
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