La prima antologia di poesie cinesi in italiano (1841). Cesare Cantù, Giosuè Carducci e il «gioco europeo» delle traduzioni

This paper examines the earliest anthology of Chinese poetry ever published in Italian, which is preserved in the Storia universale issued between 1838 and 1846 by Cesare Cantù (1804-1895). It aims to verify Cantù’s sources and his role in the 19th-century «European game» of translations. Eight of the fifteen poems translated by Cantù proved to be taken from the French rendering of a Chinese novel entitled Yu jiao li 玉嬌梨. This finding cast new light on a literary thread connecting Cantù to Jean-Pierre Abel Rémusat (1788-1832) and to Giosuè Carducci (1835-1907), whose Primavera cinese was inspired by a Chinese poem erroneously attributed to Kaokiti (Gao Qi 高 啟, 1336-1374). By retracing the editorial history of Cantù’s Storia and Carducci’s poetic collections, this paper provides new evidence concerning the wrong attribution of a poem to Kaokiti; it also discloses the links connecting Cantù’s anthology to another poem that Carducci wrote on a Chinese model and was published posthumously.