Zhongcheng yu yuyan haishi zhongcheng yu wenhua? 20 shiji chu kanzai yu Zhongguo baokanshang de Yidali wenxue zui zaoqi fanyi (忠誠於語言還是忠誠於文化？20世紀初刊載於中國報刊上的義大利文學最早期翻譯, Fedeltà linguistica o culturale? Le prime traduzioni della letteratura italiana sulla stampa cinese all’inizio del XX secolo)

Italy’s literary presence in China at the beginning of the twentieth century was quite irrelevant, and its influence on the modern Chinese canon was marginal, however it was not totally absent. The interest shown by Chinese intellectuals towards the Italian culture moved in two directions: one towards the discovery of the Italian cultural past, intending great writers of the distant past, Dante, Boccaccio, or more recent such as Collodi, De Amicis, Deledda, Pirandello; the other was directed towards the observation and discovery of the most recent European literary movements, the avant-garde, which animated the European literary scene at the end of the nineteenth century and at the beginning of the last century. In the case of Italy, we intend Gabriele D’Annunzio (1863-1938), the most appreciated Italian writer during the first decades of the twentieth-century in China, along with the only other avant-garde movement which Italy was able to offer to the world literature in that period: Futurism. This essay examines some of the first critical articles and Chinese translations of Italian literary works, published in Eastern Miscellany and Short Stories Monthly, in order to describe what was the Italian contribution to the creation of the modern Chinese literary canon.

Le prime decadi del Novecento furono per la letteratura cinese un periodo di notevoli cambiamenti, sperimentazioni e trasformazioni, all’interno del quale la fervida attività traduttiva di opere letterarie occidentali fornì un contributo significativo. L’attenzione rivolta alla letteratura italiana fu certamente marginale in quel periodo, seppur non del tutto assente. Il saggio esamina articoli critici e traduzioni di opere italiane apparse su due dei principali periodici del periodo, Mensile di narrativa e Miscellanea d’oriente, nel tentativo di analizzare il contributo della letteratura italiana alla creazione del moderno canone letterario cinese e le ragioni di queste scelte traduttive.