The project aims to examine the textual practices that have shaped the historical and contemporary transmission, dissemination, and accessibility of/in Chinese literature in new contexts of reception from intra-cultural and intercultural perspectives.
The research follows three main axes. The first one focuses on the Chinese intra-cultural space and analyses the forms of mediation, genres and textual categories, contexts and agents that have promoted the dissemination and popularisation of knowledge and ancient and pre-modern literary works, favouring their accessibility and comprehensibility in different historical periods. The research will pay particular attention to forms of annotation and glossing, commentary, prosification and translation into simplified or vernacular linguistic registers, rewriting, and adaptation.
The second axis examines the processes and mechanisms that, since the 20th century, have characterised the dissemination and reception of Chinese literature, focusing on ancient and pre-modern literature (up to 1911) in the Italian publishing and cultural context, in which the Chinese literary tradition still occupies a very marginal position. In this part, the project will pay particular attention to studies in the field of literary historiography, literary hermeneutics, and translation theory and practice – including both direct translations from Chinese and indirect translations from mediating languages.
The third axis continues the research in the context of indirect translation, investigating the processes and agents that facilitated the transmission of Western literary works into the Chinese literary system, focusing in particular on the first half of the 20th century.
Group leader: Barbara Bisetto
External members:
- Daniele Beltrame (Università per Stranieri di Perugia, Dipartimento Lingua, letteratura e arti italiane nel mondo)
Actions: WP1.1; WP 1.3
References:
Assis Rosa Alexandra, Hanna Pięta, Rita Bueno Maria (eds. 2017). Indirect Translation: Theoretical, Methodological and Terminological Issues. Special Issue of Translation Studies.
Gu Ming Dong (2014). Translating China for Western Readers. Reflective, Critical, and Practical Essays. Albany: SUNY Press.
Gu Yongxin (2014). 经学文献的衍生和通俗化：以近古时代的传刻为中心 (Derivation and Popularization of Confucian Classics Document. Centred around Circulation and Block Printing in Late Antiquity). 2 Voll. Beijing: Beijing daxue chubanshe.
Neves Josélia (2022). “Translation and accessibility. The translation of everyday things”. In Federico Zanettin, Christopher Rundle (eds). The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Methodology. London: Routledge, pp. 441-456.
Sun Yifeng, Li Dechao (eds) (2023). Transcultural Poetics. Chinese Literature in English Translation. London: Routledge.