La cultura italiana sulle riviste letterarie cinesi degli anni ’20-’30

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.

Il saggio esamina i primi articoli, apparsi sulla Xiaoshuo yuebao e Dongfang zazhi, dedicati alla letteratura italiana; in queste pagine si affronta la lettura critica che alcuni intepreti cinesi, Mao Dun, Zheng Zhenduo, Zhao Jingshen, Song Chunfang, diede di autori quali Dante, D’Annunzio, Deledda, Pirandello e I futuristi, al fine di individuare quale fu il contributo della letteratura italiana al dibattito per il rinnovamento del canone letterario cinese all’inizio del XX secolo.