Ricerc@Sapienza

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.