Abstract
The rise and revival of Dante since his introduction into China over a century ago has been a complex process, marked by two highpoints: the first in the 1920s and 30 s, with early interest in Dante’s significance as an historical figure and translation of his works into Chinese; and the second, a reprise of his work in the post-Mao reform period from the 1990s on, with the advent of serious translation projects and literary analysis from a Chinese perspective. This article examines the translation, research, and teaching of Dante and his works in China during two periods, 1880–1978 and 1979–2020, and provides a window into how Dante has been read and understood in China since the introduction of his oeuvre.
The acceptance and dissemination of Dante’s life and literary work in China have been going on for over a century and are deeply and intimately intertwined with China’s history, politics, and culture. To date, however, literary and historical scholars have not paid much attention to the topic of “Dante in China,” although reading China’s encounter with Dante offers a rich new facet to Dante studies. The history of Dante’s reception in China has been a complex process, marked by two highpoints: the first in the 1920s and 30 s, with early interest in Dante’s significance as an historical figure and translation of his works into Chinese; and the second, a reprise of his work in the post-Mao reform period from the 1990s on, with the advent of serious translation projects and literary analysis from a Chinese perspective.
The highpoint of introduction and translation of Dante’s works occurred in the period between the 1880s and the 1930s in China, which coincided with China’s rising nationalism through the early twentieth century. This stage occurred within the socio-historical context of China’s late- and post-imperial reckoning with its national and international geopolitical status. During this period, China’s politically engaged intelligentsia, the literati, embraced Dante as a symbol of the unification and creation of the modern Italian nation, and as a model for China’s own national progress. Very few academic studies on Dante’s work were produced during this time, however, and those that were published were scattered in various essays. Dante and his works were rarely taught as a dedicated subject in universities, instead appearing in often simplistic references as a part of overviews of “foreign” (non-Chinese) literature.
Interest in Dante’s work continued through the second Sino-Japanese War (World War II in the Pacific, 1937–1945) and into the early People’s Republic of China (PRC, est. 1949), but was halted during China’s Cultural Revolution in 1966–1976.
With the beginning of the period of “Reform and Opening Up” 改革开放 announced by Deng Xiaoping in 1978, the intellectual situation in China changed. By the early 1980s, Dante was rehabilitated in China, and Dante studies and translations that had begun in the 1940s and 50 s were reprised and republished. New scholarship began to emerge. The first wave of post-Mao Chinese literary scholarship on Dante was generally relatively unsophisticated, focusing on either lists of facts about Dante’s works or on simple comparisons between individual Chinese works or authors, and often marked by dated models and ideological assumptions. This stage was followed by the second highpoint of Dante studies in China beginning in the 1990s, ushering in a new generation of sophisticated literary scholarship with a global viewpoint.
This stage of Dante studies in China reached a peak in the relatively relaxed politico-cultural environment of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. Boasting a genuine diversity in theory and methodology, literary analyses of Dante threw off earlier political and ideological agendas and focused on Dante’s work in and of itself. New Chinese translations of Dante’s works on the basis of original texts have appeared in China, including a broader array of Dante’s oeuvre. In China’s universities, general education courses have established Dante as an integral part of their curriculum, focusing on popularizing and fostering a general understanding of Dante and his position in the literary canon. Currently, Dante studies in the academy include possibilities of gradual expansion and deepening.
This article examines the translation, research, and teaching of Dante and his works in China during the two phases, 1880–1978 and 1979–2020, and provides a window into how Dante has been read and understood in China over the past hundred years. It will trace this history and evolution of Dante in China to offer a broader global perspective and a more comprehensive and accurate cultural picture of Dante’s impact around the world.
The First Phase of Dante in China
Early background of Dante in China
Cultural import by foreign missionaries
Dante and his work first gained attention in China at the end of the nineteenth century, when China and the ruling Qing Dynasty (1644–1911) were undergoing a period of tumultuous change. Policies meant to insulate imperial China from outside influences established at the beginning of the eighteenth century had ended in failure after the two Opium Wars (1839–1842, 1856–1860). Western and Japanese powers were gradually opening China’s door, starting with winning access to five commercial ports located along China’s eastern coast known as “Treaty Ports,” and gradually penetrating into the interior of China with profound consequences for Chinese culture and society. The signing of the later treaties further increased western and Japanese military, political, and economic pressure on China, and forced the imperial government to lift its ban on western missionary activity. Large numbers of missionaries began to flow into China’s coastal and inland areas. By 1860, the number of Christian missionaries had increased from 31 in 1844 to more than a hundred; by the end of the nineteenth century, that number had increased to 1,500. (Gu, 2004: 114) Although missionaries came to China mainly to spread their religion, they also acted as a primary medium for the import of western culture and for cultural exchange between China and the West.
Dante’s introduction to China coincided with the spread of European missionaries and their cultural influences in the late 19th century, and western literature and literary figures came along for the ride. According to the most accurate historical data to date, the first mention of Dante in Chinese occurs in A Brief History of Europe (1886) published by English Protestant missionary and sinologist Joseph Edkins (1823–1905) (Wen, 2018: 17). Dante Alighieri appears as “丹低亚利结里” in volume eight of Edkins’ compilation. The text mainly references Dante’s importance in the context of Italian language: “The language of Italy gradually became the dialect of today from Latin. The change in this dialect was made by one of the great poets of the land named Dante Alighieri.” 1 (Edkins, 1886) The introduction to Dante forms a small part of Edkins’ work presenting European culture to China, which also included translating important western scientific and economic works into Chinese.
Dante was given a fuller treatment by Italian missionary and Chinese hero (recipient of the imperial double dragon award) Eugenio Zanoni Volpicelli (1856–1936), a noble Neapolitan who spent more than fifty years in China as a diplomat and scholar. Volpicelli joined the Chinese Customs Service from 1881 to 1899, subsequently serving as the Italian consul general of Guangzhou and Hong Kong from 1905–1919. After retiring in 1920, he lived in Shanghai and died in Nagasaki, Japan in 1936. According to many sources, Volpicelli was the first to focus on introducing Dante’s work to Chinese audiences and to translate the Divine Comedy into Chinese, some time around the turn of the twentieth century. 2 Unfortunately, Volpicelli’s works were lost after his death, and this translation has yet to be found.
Active introduction of Dante by Chinese intellectuals for the survival of the nation
Faced with a constant buffeting by internal and foreign challenges, headed by Governors-General Zeng Guofan, Li Hongzhang, Zuo Zongtang and Manchu Prince Yi Xin, China’s literati began to realize that they must learn from the so-called ‘barbarians’ in order to bring the dynasty back to a position of power. “Self Strengthening,” a westernization movement, became the clarion call of the majority of the ruling elite with the goal of achieving renewed independence for China. This group sought not only advanced military, scientific, and technological knowledge, but also proposed to learn from the west in the fields of law, politics, economics and other humanities and social sciences (Li & Liang, 2008: 93).
Dante’s name was spread more widely after the Hundred Days’ (Wuxu) Reform Movement of 1898 戊戌变法. Contemporary scholar Tian Dewang (1909–2000) mentions in the preface of his translation of the Divine Comedy (1997) that the first Chinese work to mention Dante was the Writings in Retirement 归潜记 by female scholar Shan Shili (1858–1945) in 1910. And it is not a public print. There are earlier mentions. Liang Qichao (1873–1929), one of the initiators of the Wuxu Reform Movement, founded the journal Xin Min Choong Bou in Japan where he had been forced to flee after the failure of the movement. The journal was meant to promote national consciousness and revolutionary spirit in its Chinese readership. In October 1902, the newspaper published the script of a Cantonese opera called Legend of New Rome, written by Liang himself, which tells the story of three heroes of the nineteenth-century Risorgimento in Italy. Dante is the opening character in the play. Subsequently Dante’s name occurs in many Chinese scholars’ works, such as Chinese historian and poet Wang Guowei’s “Comments on A Dream of Red Mansions” and “Literature and Education” in 1904. Even high-profile journals such as nü zi shi jie (Women’s World) mention Dante: in January 1904, the article “Biography of female writer Harriet Beecher Stowe” states “Just as the works by Rousseau led to the French revolution, so has Dante’s poetry awakened Italy’s soul.” (Chu, 1904: 59). “Dante” became well known by Chinese intellectuals, with different transliterations of his name proliferating, including 檀戴、檀德、丹顿、但底、丹第、丹丁、旦丁、丹台、丹德、 and 唐旦. (Qi, 2014: 8)
During this period, the Chinese intelligentsia actively promoted Dante and his work which they associated with national consciousness, national unity, and national survival, all of which were important preoccupations of the day. Liang Qichao, exiled from his home, felt that he was suffering the same fate as the exiled Dante. To Liang, Dante was not only a patriotic poet, but also a spiritual mentor and model.This reverence was bestowed not only on Dante himself, but also on the nation that Dante represented, namely Italy, which had just undergone a national unification and rejuvenation. All of this inspired a deep optimism in Liang Qichao for China’s own future. Poet and political activist Liu Yazi (1887–1958) wrote: “Dante of Italy, Rousseau of France, these are the mentors of their country’s nationalism.” (1908: 3).
Similarly, in 1907, Lu Xun, considered by many to be the father of modern Chinese literature, was studying in Japan. There he decided to drop out of medical school to embrace literature as a career he felt was better suited to healing the ills of, and awakening, the Chinese people. His first effort in this direction was to create a literary magazine. Clearly influenced by Dante, he named his magazine Xin Sheng (New Life) 新生 after Dante’s Vita Nova. (This magazine shut down after its first issue.) Lu Xun further reveals his belief in the importance of Dante’s work in his article “On the Power of Mara Poetry” 3 first published in 1908 and reprinted in 1981. In this article, Lu Xun praises Dante and the importance of his poems to Italy’s recent success. He asserts that even if Italy was divided through much of its history, Dante planted the seeds of a unified nation in the minds of the Italian people through his insistence on the use of the vernacular. The Italian language became the aspiration and strength of the Italian people.
The famous Chinese philosopher and diplomat Hu Shi (1892–1962), recently returned from studying in the United States, was also inspired by Dante in his search for a “good prescription” for China’s social ills. In 1917, Hu specifically references Dante in his hugely influential essay “On the improvement of literature.” This essay, which subsequently launched the vernacular movement in China, asserts that China should imitate fourteenth-century Italy to create a Chinese national language based on the vernacular and consistent with the spoken and written language. This innovation in turn would awaken the national consciousness of the people and realize a national rejuvenation (Wen, 2018).
This connection between Dante’s accomplishments for Italy and China’s needs also attracted the attention of contemporary Western scholars writing about China in the early twentieth century. American author Grove Clark, for example, describes: The years 1915–1917 can be regarded as the beginning of the third period of China’s progress. During these years, the Chinese took the first steps not only in experimenting with a new political system, but also with a kind of new culture. Cai Yuanpei severed his ties with politics and focused on education. Liang Qichao has also retired from politics and taught in Nanjing and Shanghai. Hu Shi was a student in the United States at the time, and he was the first to advocate the so-called literary revolution. However, their reforms did not have a solid foundation and seemed unlikely to succeed. Therefore, they advocated increasing the knowledge level of ordinary people first, and to this aim they planned to use language as the most important tool. In the past ten years, they have tried to spread the adoption [of the vernacular] in China. It has been successful, just as Dante was with Tuscan dialect and writers like Wycliffe and Chaucer with Midland English. (Clark, 1927: 48–49)
Translation of Dante’s works in China
The first translations of Dante’s work in the twentieth century were concentrated in the early period, between the 1920s and 1930s. After the 1930s, Chinese translations of Dante were mostly reprinting of earlier translations. New translations would have to wait until after the Mao years.
Interestingly, although Chinese intellectuals often referenced Dante before the 1920s, there were not many translations of his works before that time. In fact, there was no complete Chinese translation of Dante’s works until the late twentieth century, and even foreign-language versions of his complete works were not available in China until much later. Perhaps it has something to do with the language barrier. The Comedy and a handful of other titles may have circulated among a small circle of elite intellectuals who understood foreign languages, but the circle was indeed small. After more than a century of intentional isolationism stymying cultural interest and exchange in the Middle Kingdom, China found itself entering the twentieth century with few linguists or polyglots well versed in western languages. Very few Chinese understood Italian. Despite the fact that Dante was well known among China’s intelligentsia, “Dante” remained little more than a name, while a deeper familiarity with his life and works were lacking.
Dante’s early reputation in China reached a peak in the 1920s and 1930s. The six-hundredth anniversary of Dante’s death in 1921 brought new attention to the author in China, and marked an important year for the translation and introduction of Dante and his works in China. Some journals, such as The Eastern Miscellany, Story Magazine, Women’s Magazine, and Journal of Literature and Philosophy explicitly celebrated the anniversary and its significance. 4
For example, in 1921, Story Magazine published Qian Daosun (1887–1966)’s Shen Qu Yi Luan, a partial translation of Dante’s Comedy including Inferno I, II, and III. The first and third cantos are translated in Li Sao style, and the second in prose. In December 1924, the Commercial Press also published the three Inferno cantos together as a single volume, also titled Shen Qu Yi Luan. A well-known interpreter and close friend of Lu Xun who graduated from the University of Rome, Qian Daosun, added rich annotations to his translation, bringing a broad background knowledge of other cultures and traditions from medieval European literature to the Hebrew calendar to bear in his work (Plark, 1998: 607).
But even as Qian Daosun was translating Dante’s works, there was an ongoing debate among China’s literati about the morality of translating the works of certain western classical writers such as Dante. A group of China’s most revered public intellectuals around Mao Dun (1896–1981) and Zheng Zhenduo (1898–1958) debated with the equally respected Guo Moruo (1892–1978) over the choice of translation candidates, arguing that foreign translation was unworthy. Their debate hinged on their antithetical views of the purpose of literature: whether it should be “for life’s sake”(为人生), as promoted by the Literary Research Society文学研究会 run by Mao Dun and his cronies, or “for art’s sake”(为艺术), as encouraged by the Creation Society创造社and Guo Moruo. Story Magazine, edited by Mao Dun and Zheng Zhenduo and published by the Literary Research Association, reflected the Association’s theoretical position on literature and translation, and its realist approach to Dante’s works was typical (Qi, 2014: 11). As Zheng Zhenduo (1921) wrote in “The Blind Translator”: It is not only that the recent published works are not suitable for random translation, but even those with definite value seem to be inappropriate for translation. At the present time, translating Dante’s Divine Comedy, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Goethe’s Faust also seems to be a bit uneconomical. To all the translators, please open your eyes and take a look at the original book! Look at China now, and then engage in translation.1
Zheng Zhenduo, Zhou Zuoren, and other members of the Literary Research Association were all prominent in translating other foreign literary works, but they drew the line at the works of Dante. Other intellectuals, however, such as Hu Shi believed that Dante could play an important role for the New China, and therefore respected him as a model for shaping China’s new national image and spirit. In this era of intellectual ferment, there were many approaches towards Dante and his work, attitudes which also hinted at a conflict between nationalism and globalism.
In the 1930s, as Dante became known to a growing audience in China, more works were translated into Chinese. The poet Wang Duqing completed a full translation of Vita Nova, which was published by Guangming Book Publishing House in 1934. As of 1941, it had been reprinted four times; and after World War II, it was reprinted again twice before 1948. It was also published once by the Chongqing Branch of Guangming in 1943 (Laurenti, 1999: 16). Also in 1934, Shanghai New Life Book Company published a sixty-four-page translation of the Comedy by Fu Donghua. Not a literal translation, this version is more of a story about the Comedy told according to the understanding and preferences of the translator. Symbolist poet Zhu Xiang also translated seven sonnets from Vita Nova and included them in his anthology Guava Collection (1936). (Laurenti, 1999: 10) Yan Jicheng translated Inferno I into classical Chinese in L’Impartial in 1933. It is known that Yan accepted an invitation by the Commercial Press to do a complete translation of the Comedy, but the actual work has never been found. With the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War soon after the commission of these works, it is no mystery why some were ultimately lost to history.
The first full Chinese translation of the Comedy was by Wang Weike, begun in October 1934, and based on French, Italian, and English versions of the original. The Inferno was not published until February 1939 by the Shanghai Commercial Press, because the Sino-Japanese War in 1937 forced the author to flee his home and live as a refugee. After an eight-year hiatus, Wang resumed his translation of Purgatorio and Paradiso in May 1943, and in August 1948, the Shanghai Commercial Press finally published the three volumes in full. Wang’s translation faithfully narrates the content of the original poem in prose.
Zhu Weiji began his own translation of Dante’s work around 1935, and largely completed his first draft in 1942. The Monthly Magazine in Shanghai planned to publish this new translation serially but ended abruptly with Inferno XIII. The complete translation finally came out in 1954, published by the New Literature and Art Publishing House. Zhu’s translation was based on an English translation of the Divine Comedy and was written in the form of free-verse poetry. Some verses were hard to understand.
In 1935, Yu Gengyu began another translation of Inferno, also choosing free-verse poetry as his medium. His translation was first published in 1936 in Zhong Yuan, a supplement to the national newspaper Republic of China Daily. In 1944, the journal Literature and Arts in Times and Trends in Chongqing, which specialized in translating foreign literary works, published Yu’s work serially. Yu’s version tries to preserve the rhythm of Dante’s original poem. Compared to Qian Daosun’s translation, Yu’s work may better represent Dante’s proposition of writing in the vernacular. Yu did not translate either Purgatorio or Paradiso (Wen, 2018: 1).
Despite any earlier objections to translating Dante’s Comedy, Mao Dun included a special chapter on “Dante’s Vita Nova” in his Chinese Translation of Western Literary Masterpiece (1935). 5 Even with the controversy, Mao Dun did not deny Dante’s importance to the history of world literature.
After the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, Italy found its way increasingly into Chinese consciousness. The official newspaper of the Communist party, the People’s Daily published many news stories about Italy, mainly focusing on political situations such as party elections and workers’ strikes. This concern for class alliances with Italy continued throughout the Mao period. With the establishment of diplomatic relations between China and Italy in the 1950s, cultural exchanges between the two countries became relatively frequent. Li Jiye, who visited Italy with a delegation in 1956, published A Visit to Italy (1957) that mentions Dante in several chapters. The Sino-Italian friendship resulting from this political alliance was one factor creating a favorable and relatively free environment for the translation and study of Dante in the 1950s.
Wang Weike’s and Zhu Weiqi’s translations of the Comedy were reprinted during this period. According to statistical data from The Catalogue of Translations and Publications of Foreign Classical Literature 1949–1979, Wang Weike’s Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso were printed by the Commercial Press from 1949 to 1951, each with 2000 copies, for a total of 6000 copies. From 1954 to 1959, the three volumes were combined into one, which was printed by the Writers Publishing House and People’s Literature Publishing House for a total of 19,500 copies. From 1954 to 1962, Zhu Weiji’s Inferno was printed by the New Literature and Art Publishing House and Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House, totaling 23,820 copies. In 1962, Purgatorio and Paradiso were printed by the Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House, each with 5000 copies, for a total of 10,000 copies (Library of the State Administration of Publishing Edition, 1980).
After Liu Hui published a selected translation of De Vulgari Eloquentia which appeared in Translation of Literature and Art Theories in 1958, no new translation of Dante’s work is found in the 1960s and 1970s. Wu Xinghua translated the entire Comedy in terza rima from the original Italian version, but his manuscript was burned during the Cultural Revolution, leaving only Inferno II. Wu’s version was both accurate and fluent, even with the strict rhyme scheme; his work that was lost was truly a masterpiece.
Research on Dante
When Dante was first introduced to China, there was no real academic treatment of his work. Instead, most information presented broad and simplistic descriptions of the author and his oeuvre. The focus was on Dante’s meaning for the Chinese nation, rather than on Dante and his work per se.
In 1923, Hu Yuzhi, You Xiong and Wen Tian co-edited a book called Dante and Goethe, published by the Commercial Press. A more systematic introduction to the life and works of Dante than other contemporary offerings, it still focused on Dante’s social and political significance, similar to Liang Qichao’s earlier treatment of Dante. Several other works of the period also offer a rudimentary introduction to Dante, such as Chen Hengzhe’s History of the West (1924), or the reviews of the literature of individual countries, such as Fu Shaoxian’s Italian Literature and Wang Xihe’s Italian Literature. 6
Both Zheng Zhenduo’s Literary Outline (1927) and Mao Dun’s General Theory of Western Literature (1930) include introductions to Dante and the Comedy. As mentioned above, Dante also appeared in Story Magazine which they edited. Mao Dun’s Speeches on World Literary Masterpieces (1936) also includes a chapter about the Comedy, which, starts with a comparison between Dante and Qu Yuan, and presents Dante’s background and life in great detail. 7 Mao Dun also wrote articles about Dante and published them in the monthly journal The Middle School Students. This journal was aimed at helping help students familiarize themselves with masterpieces of world literature. Xie Liuyi’s “Dante’s Divine Comedy” (1931), Shi Ke’s “Ethics in Dante’s Divine Comedy” (1933), Mu Gong’s “How Dante Composed the Divine Comedy” (1940), Jiang Shangfeng’s “Dante’s Divine Comedy” (1942), all had a relatively large influence at the time. (Qi, 2014: 9) In the 1920s and 1930s, Dante studies branched out beyond the Comedy with articles such as “Dante’s view of speech” by Xin Ren in 1936. There are few such articles, however. The lack of Chinese translations of other works by Dante such as De Vulgari Eloquentia, Convivio, and De Monarchia circumscribed possibilities.
With little early research available to them, academic scholars relied heavily on existing foreign research for their understanding of Dante’s work. As early as the 1920s, Wu Mi completed a translation of “On Dante’s Divine Comedy” by CH Grandgent, his mentor at Harvard. It was published in the forty-first issue of the Critical Review in May 1925. But the number of such works was very limited.
From the 1930s on, “revolutionary literature” became the dominant trope in China, and translations of foreign scholars’ research became more widespread. Notable are The Comedy: A criticism of the Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri Translated from the Italian of Francesco De Sanctis (1932) by AL Pollard-Urquhart and Dante’s Brief Biography (1938) by K De Kalocsay. Works like these were translated into Chinese.
The introduction of Dante and his works by Chinese scholars was quite different from that of foreign scholars. Chinese scholarship was still at an elementary stage of literary borrowing, importing existing research and conclusions. The content of the scholarship was rather uniform, with few differences between the articles. New discoveries and original insights were scarce.
After 1949, very few articles about Dante appeared in China. It was not until 1954 that the “The Reprint of the Chinese Version of The Divine Comedy and Shakespeare’s Drama Collection” was published (People’s Daily, May 17, 1954) reaffirming the value of the Comedy to China’s literary world.
Marián Gálik (2012: 18) argues that from 1949 to 1979, state-sanctioned atheism in mainland China made it almost impossible to study and appreciate the Comedy. His argument is not entirely true. Dante’s works became relatively rare, and research was considerably slower than in the 1920s and 1930s. The reason was not merely atheism; China’s political ideology was paramount. Dante studies in China in this period can be viewed from two perspectives: on the one hand, existing research on Dante was relatively safe and unscathed by social criticism or political suppression; this protective aura may have resulted from mentions of Dante by both Marx and Engels. On the other hand, the study of Dante was slowly restricted to a very narrow and specific view.
Literary scholar Zhang Yuechao points out the relationship between Dante and Marx and Engels in his 1957 work. (1957: 34) Zhang notes that in the preface of the Italian version of the Communist Manifesto, Engels states that Dante was the last poet of the Middle Ages and the first of the new era (Engels, 1964: 22). He similarly notes that Marx cites line 9 from Inferno III in his preface to Das Kapital: “Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate.” In the next three decades, almost all Chinese literary critics followed Engels’ lead in their discussion of Dante.
Zhang Yuechao’s “Dante and His Divine Comedy” was published in 1957 as a chapter in his monograph Western European Classic Writers and Works, which discusses the greatness of Western European giants of literature such as Homer, Dante, Rabelais, Swift, Fielding, Byron, Goethe, and their masterpieces. The Dante chapter begins: The Italian poet Dante (Alighieri Dante) is a great figure standing at the historical intersection of the Middle Ages and modern times. As Engels said: ‘He is the last poet of the Middle Ages and the first of a new age.’ (Zhang, 1957: 34)
This kind of analysis is typical of the period. Zhang considers Dante as a strong warrior and vocal singer in the great storm that was the transition from medieval feudalism to modern capitalism. But he also argues that the Comedy is a solemn and noble masterpiece reflecting Dante’s artistic genius. Zhang’s work is a combative and eloquent political document addressing some of the most pressing issues of the day. Zhang’s review also is heavily inflected by the political influences of his times, showcasing Marxist class theory, a materialist point of view, and criticism of idealism and its theorists. Discussing Dante, the article argues: The modern Italian idealist aesthetician Croce and the modern British so-called imagist poet T. S. Eliot wrote about Dante’s work, which distorted the meaning of Divine Comedy and completely cancelled it, especially its political and social arguments. Works like this will not help us understand Dante but will lead us astray. (Zhang, 1957: 36)
Aside from its political declarations, Zhang’s work offered a relatively comprehensive introduction to Dante’s Divine Comedy in the 1950s. His analysis of the literary aspects of the piece as well as its status in the literary canon were spot on. His insight that Dante was able to create a sublime and focused artistic image in only a few lines of text is an enduring one.
Throughout this period, scholars continued to quote Engel’s evaluation of Dante’s work and argued that this interpretation should direct any research in Dante studies. In 1960, Liu Kairong’s “The Tendency and Limitations of Dante’s Divine Comedy” asserts that Dante’s “progress” lies in his political orientation and practical significance.
The History of European Literature edited by Yang Zhouhan et al. (first printed in 1964 and reprinted by many times in the following years) introduces Dante's life and analyzes the Comedy in the fourth section of chapter two. First, the chapter again quotes Engels, solidifying Dante’s status in current Chinese academic circles and protecting Dante’s influence in the tumultuous decade of the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976). Second, it discusses the enduring significance of the work: “In the era of transition between old and new, how can individuals and humans go through suffering and trials from confusion and mistakes to reach truth and perfection?” (Yang et al., 1979: 112). It also explains the progressive significance of the Comedy: it “exposed the reality of the time, such as the greed and corruption of the church, the cruelty and tyranny of feudal rulers, and the greed for money and profit of the citizens.” (Yang et al.,1979: 113). These comments reflected the reality of Dante’s work, but also harmonized with the new Chinese cultural environment that was deeply committed to criticizing the decadent culture of Western capitalism (Jiang, 2005: 132).
Nonetheless, as China’s Cultural Revolution gathered steam from 1966 to 1976, although Dante had been cast in a positive light by Marx and Engels, their imprimatur was not enough to overcome political realities in China. Ultimately, Dante was judged according to the “essential” problem of class struggle and was categorized as belonging to the bourgeoisie. For instance, important works of the time Selected statements on Humanism by Bourgeois Writers and Artists from the Renaissance to the 19th Century (1971) and Selected Materials on the Humanity of the Landlord Bourgeoisie (1973) labeled Dante and his works as having “bourgeois” or “landlord class” connotations. Under these political conditions, research on Dante reached a nadir. Dante and his works were well known only to a cadre of intellectuals educated before the advent of the Cultural Revolution, and completely out of reach of ordinary citizens. Indeed, at that time, the vast majority of Chinese youth had no knowledge at all of either Dante or the Comedy.
Teaching Dante in universities
There are few records about teaching Dante’s works in the early 20th century in China, but we can find some clues from contemporary textbooks. In January 1913, the Ministry of Education of the Republic of China issued regulations governing universities. These statutes classified literature, including Italian, into eight categories. When Cai Yuanpei became Minister of Education, the national curriculum of university was reformed according to the American academic system. The curriculum specified both general and specialized courses on literature, including specialized courses on Italian literature. An introduction to Dante was one of the key components of this Italian literature course. Generally, however, Dante and his Comedy were not taught as a separate course; they were included in a broad introductory course with standardized materials.
In September 1917, Zhou Zuoren began teaching European literary history at Peking University, China’s premier institute of higher learning. His lectures were compiled into the book History of European Literature, which appeared in 1918. This book was the first monograph on western literary history in China. Many universities adopted it as a textbook. The fifth chapter of the third volume, “The Pioneer of the Renaissance”, refers to Dante. Zhang’s friend and colleague Mao Dun who started to teach “History of Western Literature” at Shanghai University in 1923, also used Zhou’s textbook.
Dante and his work appeared regularly in Chinese universities of the time. Biographies of China’s leading intelligentsia include references to their lectures on Dante. For example, famous novelist and dramatist Lao She (1899–1966) introduced Dante and the Comedy while he taught as professor at Qilu University in the 1930s. Lao She stressed Dante’s use of the vernacular to compose the Comedy.
Wu Mi (1894–1978) taught the course “History of European Literature” during his appointment at Tsinghua University and Southwestern Associated University (set up by three major universities during the Sino-Japanese War to continue education out of the way of active fighting) (1930–1940). According to historical accounts, when Wu talked about the Comedy, he gestured dramatically to depict heaven and hell, looking up at the sky and bowing his head to dramatize his material. In 1931 Lei Haizong lectured on the “General History of Europe” at Wuhan University. In his second of a series of lectures on the topic, he included a section titled “The cultural complex of feudal times: Dante”, which presented a comprehensive and detailed analysis of Dante.
The teaching of western literature facilitated the spread of new ideas by China’s literati and was itself a means to popularize western culture. In this period, scholars promoted the idea that Dante laid the foundation of Italian literature and ushered Italian literature into the Renaissance.
After the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, the educational curriculum and preparation of teaching materials were dictated by the state. Presentation of Dante was subject to political standardization in colleges, where it appeared mainly in foreign literature history courses, foreign literature history textbooks, and selected textbooks on works of foreign literature. After the onset of the Cultural Revolution in 1966, as colleges and universities closed, all teaching about Dante or otherwise ground to a halt.
In December 1958, the Department of Chinese of Beijing Normal University compiled a publication called Foreign Literature References. The book’s preface states that teaching and research on foreign literature in higher teachers’ colleges must adhere to Marxist proletarian ideology; that students must study foreign literature from the perspective of Marxism-Leninism; and that students must be educated in Communist ideology. The guide did not make any mention of teaching Dante or Dante’s works.
In 1961, the Department of Western Languages of Peking University began a compilation The History of European Literature, edited by Yang Zhouhan, Wu Dayuan and Zhao Luozhen, which included a section dedicated to Dante. The book was divided into two volumes. In 1964, the People’s Publishing House published the first volume. With the intervention of the Cultural Revolution, however, the second volume was not published until 1979; coverage of Dante was in the first volume.
Selected Works of Foreign Literature (1961) edited by Zhou Xuliang was published by the Ministry of Higher Education as a foreign literature textbook, used mainly as a supplement to the university-level course “Foreign Literary History.” Zhou included Wang Weike’s translation of Cantos 5, 32, and 33 of the Inferno in the text.
Rapid Development of Dante studies after 1978
Social and Cultural Context of the reform period
Deng Xiaoping’s Reform and Opening Up policy, initiated at the Third Plenum of the Eleventh Central Committee in 1978, effected a shift in not only the economic, judicial, and political systems of China, but also in China’s cultural milieu. China moved from a planned economy to a socialist market economy and from an isolated country to a country wide open to the outside world.
In 1979, Deng Xiaoping broadened his reforms to rehabilitate and reposition the study of foreign literature. In his Congratulations speech to the Fourth Congress of Chinese Literary and Artistic Workers in 1979 (referred to as the Fourth Congress of Literature and Art), Deng proclaimed (1979: 1): “All the advanced and outstanding things in ancient and foreign literary and artistic works and performing arts should be used as reference and for learning.” The party’s literary and artistic guidelines for China thus began to change, dismantling the earlier ban on foreign literature. Freed from the narratives of class and political struggle, literary studies once more entered the limelight with renewed political will. Heavy-handed intervention in research and teaching was greatly reduced, replaced by state-sanctioned publication of research guidelines and encouragement. Foreign literature researchers and translators began to enjoy greater freedom, translating and introducing works representative of almost every country and nation in the world.
After the establishment of the Chinese Society of Foreign Literature on December 5, 1978 in response to Deng’s call, a large number of foreign literature societies emerged, much like the period of the 1920s and 30 s. In addition, a new series of foreign literature journals appeared in China, such as Foreign Literature, Foreign Literature Studies, World Literature, and Translations. The introduction, translation, and evaluation of foreign literature entered a new, more open stage.
In 1981, the journalist and translator Xu Chi divided literature into three levels, probably influenced by the ancient literary critic Zhong Rong (467–518) and his classic Shi Pin. Among one hundred Chinese and foreign writers, Xu Chi rates only seven authors as “first class,” among them, Dante. The other six were Homer, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Balzac, Tolstoy, and Gorky. (Xu, 1981: 56–57)
Literary research in China since 2000 has benefited from an increase in the popularity of the Internet, allowing scholars and students to visit websites at home and abroad, download materials in various languages, and communicate with foreign counterparts in real time. These connections have highlighted the need for improved linguistic facility in Chinese scholars. Along with other fields, research into Dante and the Comedy in China has become increasingly internationalized and contact with the Italian scholarly community has also expanded (Jiang, 2005: 132).
Dante studies in China regained acceptance and gained traction, and the number of works on Dante—including translations, introductions, and analyses—continued to rise. Research into Dante’s work has begun to shift from outer to inner attributes, from a unified voice to a plurality of views, and from stereotypes to unique discourses, exploring more and more of Dante’s spiritual and artistic world.
Research on Dante
As academia in China began to recover in the post-Mao period, scholars began to carefully revisit the study of Dante, although retaining socialist theories in their analyses as a well-placed cautionary hedge. The first of these analyses to appear was an article by Ma Jiajun (1979), re-introducing Dante and the Comedy to the Chinese audience. Its content roughly mimics that of the 1964 chapter on Dante in History of European Literature. Another article by scholar Hua Yuqing “The Modernity of the Divine Comedy” in 1980 reveals the depth of this caution, or perhaps the effectiveness of political indoctrination: four of eleven total citations in Hua’s article refer to the Selected Works of Marx and Engels. His essay mainly focuses on Dante’s struggle against the Catholic Church.
In 1989, Li Yuti wrote a book entitled Dante and the Divine Comedy, published by Shaanxi People’s Publishing House, a relatively conservative publisher. Again, an analysis of the citations can be revealing. Most quotations come from Dante’s original text, with quotations from the works of Marx and Engels following closely. The works of Marx and Engels are cited fourteen times, while Burckhardt’s The Culture of the Italian Renaissance is cited three times, and Gorky twice. This kind of ideologically inflected introduction to Dante’s work continued to appear even into the 1990s, dampening scholarly curiosity and enthusiasm as well as academic spirit. (Jiang, 2005: 132)
Beginning in 1989, academia began a process of introspection. Guo Hong’an courageously argued that a focus on class made the interpretation of Western literary classics lose vitality. Similarly, Xiao Jinlong (1989: 17) also points out: Research on the Divine Comedy is even worse. Scholars have worked hard on this text, trying to use it to prove Engel’s famous conclusion from the perspective of social development... It is not so much to study the Divine Comedy as a literary work, but rather to judge it through the lenses of history. This kind of criticism can hardly be called literary criticism.
Li Yuti also expresses a certain degree of disappointment with the research situation noting that Chinese readers were largely ignorant of the history and science of the medieval western world, as well as of medieval religious philosophy, Catholic traditions, and scholastic theology. Li points out that contemporary research sought only to “classify what things belong to the medieval period, and what to the new age.” (Li, 1989a: 53) The literary critics of this period often confuse the subject of their criticism with the author Dante himself, rather than his writings, judging Dante rather than analyzing his work in a meaningful way. These tendencies underestimate Dante’s profound insights into the human spirit in the Comedy, and cause extensive misunderstanding about the Middle Ages, Christianity, and humanism. (Jiang, 2005: 132)
Slowly, however, in the 1990s a new and unprecedented interest in Dante blossomed. More and more scholars began to reconsider literary criticism based on the earlier Marxist political and economic model, and are re-reading Western masterpieces, resetting critical standards, and reconstructing Chinese accounts of the history of Western literature. It is in the 1990s that research on Dante reached a peak. In this period, scholarly research on Dante’s literary work shifted from superficial judgments to a more genuine exploration of the spiritual value of his works. Scholars no longer focused on a Marxist, pragmatist approach, nor did they have to vet their analyses against considerations of political probity, but instead were able to consider Dante’s work sui generis and critique his work from a position of authenticity. Dante studies thus took off, now including comparative studies and analysis of Dante’s works, grounded on the original text and encompassing multiple perspectives, including philology, etymology, prosody, and ethics.
Parallel comparative study
Dante entered China through comparative literary studies in the early twentieth century. Chinese intellectuals of that period frequently approached Dante’s work through a comparison with their own experience and environment. Many of these comparisons are superficial at best. Real and deep comparative research did not emerge until the 1990s. Comparisons were made most often between Dante and members of the Chinese literati, particularly between Dante and the Warring States poet Qu Yuan (340–278 BCE) and author Lu Xun.
Marián Gálik (2012: 21) suggests that Mao Dun may be the first person in China to compare Qu Yuan with Dante, but that the comparison is not an apt one. According to Gálik, studying the allegorical and lyrical features of Qu’s poem Li Sao and the Comedy may be a suitable entry point to reveal the relationship between the two great poets, but their lives, times, and work are not comparable. He misses the fact that as early as 1922, Liang Qichao (1922) already compares Dante with Qu Yuan, asserting that few poets can match Qu Yuan’s literary talents apart from Dante and his Comedy. The comparison between Qu and Dante also reveals the prevailing preoccupation of China’s intellectuals during the 1920s and 30 s: the preservation of the Chinese nation. The comparison plays on the fact that Qu Yuan lived through an invasion of his country, which was deeply humiliated. His grief, disappointment, and worry as an intellectual were similar to Dante’s. Suo Shaowu (1988), Chang Qinyi (1989) and Sun Zhentian (1990) also address this topic in their works.
Comparisons between Dante and Lu Xun mainly focus on two points: one, to compare the similarities and differences in spirit and thoughts between Lu Xun and Dante, such as their view of Hell in Zhong Qiu’s article (1992); the other, to compare their works, such as comparing Lu Xun’s story Wild Grass to the Comedy as Wang Jipeng and Li Hongyan (2004) have done; or comparing Lu Xun’s Old Tales Retold and Paradiso as written by scholar Ge Tao (2004b).
As Chinese literary scholars deepened their understanding of Dante and of literary criticism and developed more sophisticated modes of parallel research, simplistic comparisons between the historical situations of Chinese authors and those of Dante were eclipsed. The essays “The Concept of Hell in the Divine Comedy and Dunhuang Bianwen Stories” (2000a) and “The Comparison of the Concept of Heaven in The Divine Comedy and Journey to the West” (2000b) by Jiang Yuebin show scholarly progression in critical analysis
Comparative studies of non-Chinese literati and Dante also began to appear in China in the 1990s. Lu Yang’s “Dante and Aquinas: From Biblical Studies to Poetics” (1997) shows changes in the optics of power transition, from old authorities to new ones, using primary and secondary resources including Albertus Magnus, St. Augustine, Boethius, and St. Bonaventura, and other comments. Li Yongyi’s “Language and Belief: Derrida and Dante” in 2015, and Zhong Bili’s “Lame foot: Eros and Language of Dante and Petrarch” (2020) show that Chinese scholars began to engage with field in a meaningful way, integrating their work with Western research and in dialogue with it.
Impact study is rising
The study of Dante’s influence on China has become an important aspect of research on Dante. Three aspects of Dante’s impact in China are particularly worth examining: Dante’s influence on Chinese culture; Dante’s impact on Chinese writers’ creativity, particularly in the realm of poetry; and Dante’s influence on Chinese authors’ thought and spirit.
The most critical impact of Dante and his work on Chinese culture is undoubtedly his promotion of the vernacular in writing. Dante’s advocacy of the vernacular was persuasive in China, where classical Chinese was as imbricated in literary output as Latin was in early European literature. The significance of adopting a vernacular for the creation and maintenance of a truly national modern language is indisputable. Many Chinese authors have researched this aspect of Dante’s influence on China, such as Wu Shiyong (2004) and Wang Hao (2014).
Scholars are also keen to discuss Dante’s influence on Hu Shi’s New Culture Movement around the time of the May 4th Movement in 1919. Hu has always interpreted the New Culture Movement he advocated as “a Chinese Renaissance” and compared his promotion of vernacular writing with Dante’s own accomplishment. Articles on this topic abound in China, such as Ouyang Zhesheng’s “Chinese Renaissance—Analysis of Hu Shi’s English Works Based on Chinese Culture” (2009), Xiao Jian’s “The Western Splendor on Chinese Renaissance” (2016), Gao Shanqin’s “A Comparative Study of Dante’s De Vulgari Eloquentia and Hu Shi’s On the improvement of literature” (2011). In recent years, however, some scholars have questioned the validity of a comparison between the European Renaissance and China’s New Culture Movement, arguing that Hu Shi’s new literary movement was only a fiction based on a misreading of the history of the European Renaissance and the development of vernacular prose. Cheng Wei (2009) argues that the New Culture Movement was actually led and promoted by the Beijing government in order to establish the dominant position of northern Mandarin (the vernacular) throughout the country and as also a precursor to the political unification of the country. Other scholars have analyzed the similarity of the political demands of Hu Shi’s vernacular literary movement and Dante’s De Vulgari Eloquentia and clarified that Hu Shi’s use of “Renaissance” as a metaphor for the New Cultural Movement is less due to any misunderstanding of the term, and more due to Hu’s insistence on keeping a low profile for decades, during which time he attempted to assimilate the essence of Chinese and western ideas. (Xiao, 2016: 51)
The most tangible impact of Dante’s influence on China is on Chinese poetry. From the May Fourth Movement in 1919 to the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, poets Guo Moruo, Wang Duqing and many others incorporated references to Dante and the Comedy into their poems, and many also made specific reference to Dante or the Comedy in their emotional expressions in their poetry. Poems in this genre include Guo Moruo’s “As if Dante were Coming” (1923) and Wang Duqing’s “In front of Dante’s Tomb” (1926).
An embrace of Dante’s work and an exploration into great Chinese poetry proceeded simultaneously. Poets also mined deep into the spirit of the Comedy to capture their own spiritual experiences. Ge Guilu’s works (2006) explore Dante’s dissemination in China against a background of east/west cultural exchange by combing and analyzing various Chinese works. Ge’s work presents a detailed discussion of the relationship between Dante and Lu Xun, Ba Jin, Sheng Cheng, and modern Chinese poets Yu Dafu, Guo Moruo, Wang Duqing, Yin Fu, Zhu Xiang and Dante. (Qi, 2014: 5)
Lao She was also deeply influenced by Dante. The similarity between Lao She and Dante, according to researchers, mostly lies in the embrace of the humanistic perspective on the realm of the soul, rather than from a shared political perspective. Ge Tao has contributed significantly to research on the relation between Lao She and Dante, with articles such as “Inquiry into the Literature of the Spirit” (2000) and “The Literary Connection between Lao She and Dante” (2004a). Ge Tao argues that the pinnacle of Lao She’s indebtedness to Dante was Four Generations Under One Roof (1948). Ge’s article “Analysis of the meaning of vision” (2002) combines impact and parallel study to explore the relationship between Lao She’s Wei Shen and Dante’s Vita Nova; Ge’s “Four Generations Under One Roof and the Divine Comedy” (2009) suggests that Lao She’s “loss” of the last thirteen chapters of Four Generations Under One Roof was a deliberate imitation of the loss of the last thirteen chapters of Dante’s Comedy. Other research into the connection between Lao She and Dante includes Li Dongyuan’s “Lao She’s Literary View and Dante’s Influence during the Anti-Japanese War” (2005). (Qi, 2014: 3)
The quintessential expression of the impact of Dante’s work on a Chinese writer’s thought and spirit is captured by one of China’s most famous writers, Ba Jin (1904–2005). Ba Jin discussed Dante’s influence in his Random Thoughts (1986). Ba Jin’s relationship with Dante’s work can be divided into three important stages: the first, in the 1930s, when Ba Jin did not accept the importance of Dante’s work due to Ba Jin’s literary outlook at the time; the second, the incompatibilities between the Cultural Revolution and the Inferno; and the third, a discussion about this historical fact after the Cultural Revolution, including the publication of Random Thoughts and the award of the Dante International Medal. During the Cultural Revolution, Dante’s work not only gave Ba Jin the hope and courage to survive, but also helped him to be freer and more independent. We can see that the intellectuals represented by Ba Jin felt a connection with the hell depicted in Dante’s Comedy during the Cultural Revolution when he was imprisoned in a so-called cowshed, a makeshift prison for intellectuals where he was relegated as punishment for the crime of being a member of the intelligentsia. On the one hand, the experience deepened the personal resilience of Chinese intellectuals; on the other, it enriched the traditional Chinese concept of hell, giving rise to a modern and integrated view of hell. (Qi, 2014: vi) Wang Xiyan’s “The Holy Fire in Purgatory” (1982) and Qi Ting’s thesis (2014) also address the relationship between Ba Jin and Dante.
Systematic all-around research
As the 1990s progress, Dante studies moved beyond the evaluation of morality, politics, society, and culture, and re-examined Dante from the perspective of artistic creation and aesthetic value.
Hu Zhiming (1992) affirmed the significance of historical progress attributed to Dante yet steered away from earlier simplistic criticisms of Dante’s “traces of Feudalism” based on Marxist preconceptions. Can Xue (2011) explained the Comedy from the perspective of the spiritual experience of training the soul. Her work argues that the Comedy describes the eternal contradiction and struggle between the body and the soul, and constantly pushes towards death and rebirth in thought and art, leading finally to the ultimate beauty. Her work positions the Comedy’s spiritual connotations and artistic characteristics in an extraordinary and mysterious dimension. Li Zhongxing (1992) treated the Comedy as a work of “dreamy realism.” 梦幻现实主义 Scholars Liu Jianjun (2000) and Jiang Chengyong (2003) explore the meaning of the human spirit in Dante’s works, tracing the concept back to Dante’s own times. Su Hui and Qiu Zihua (2004) analyze Dante’s Comedy, De Vulgari Eloquentia, Convivio and Epistola a Cangrande della Scala from the perspective of literary aesthetics combined with medieval theology, and point out the origins of Dante’s aesthetic in Christian theological concepts, which hold that God is “the origin of beauty” and “the standard and measure for judging beauty and ugliness.” (Su and Qiu, 2004: 128) Zhu Zhenyu’s “Virgil in the Divine Comedy: an insufficient Love” (2013) and “An Analysis of Latini’s Sin” (2015) emphasizes the importance of text analysis in methodology. Wang Jun’s “Another Understanding of Dante and the Divine Comedy” (2015) attempts a new evaluation of Dante, emphasizing that literary analysis should be based on the text itself. Wang has also begun a new translation of the Comedy, which will be published in 2021.
In the beginning of the twenty-first century, a new cohort of Dante scholars began to appear in China’s universities, producing important new scholarship on Dante. Doctoral dissertations with in-depth explorations of Dante, such as Jiang Yuebin’s Dante’s Poetic Thoughts under the Aura of Theology (2005), Zhang Chunjie’s A Study of Dante’s Thoughts (2009), and Zhang Yanjie’s The Promise of the Rule of Virtue: A Study of Political Intention in the Evaluation of Dante’s Historical Figures (2010) have resulted from this new wave of literary studies. In 2007, recent graduate Jiang Yuebin also published Ethical Poetics: Research on Dante’s Poetic Thoughts. Dante studies in China began to reach a new level of interest and sophistication.
As in any academic milieu, however, problems with scholarship remain. Problems in translation are still apparent, significant misunderstandings of the material remain, and duplication of research on the same phenomenon is not uncommon. Dante studies in China still have room for development in both depth and breadth.
Translation of Dante
From the late 1970s to the early 1980s, in the early years of “relaxation”, all sectors of China were recovering from the trauma of the Cultural Revolution. Translation of foreign literature was not at the top of the list of necessary reforms. Earlier translations of Dante were reprinted, such as Wang Weike and Zhu Weiji’s Divine Comedy and Wang Duqing’s Vita Nova, but no new Chinese translations of Dante’s works appeared. It was not until the late 1980s and early 1990s that new translations were undertaken in conjunction with a new influx of Western works. (Qi, 2014: 20)
Tian Dewang’s translation of Inferno V appeared in the journal Foreign Literature in 1984. In 1986, his translation of the first four cantos of Inferno came out in the publication “Sweet Life (Italian Literature Special Issue)” edited by Lyu Tongliu and published by Lijiang Publishing House. In 1985, Zhu Hong translated De Monarchia; in 1987, Miao Langshan’s posthumous translation of De Vulgari Eloquentia appeared in its entirety, as well as a section of the Epistola a Cangrande della Scala. In 1988, Qian Hongjia translated 38 sonnets of Vita Nova and Rime from the English; in 1996 and 1997, Lyu Tongliu translated Convivio (Laurenti, 1999: 16–17). Dante’s biographies by Mario Tobino (1984) and George Holme (1989) were also translated and appeared in China.
In the twenty-first century, as the cultural and academic environment continues to open, translations and familiarity with Dante’s works continue to gain momentum and depth. Especially for the Comedy, important translations have been added to the count. Most are from the Italian and are faithful to the original. In the choice of translation genre, there are both prose and poetry styles, all linguistic improvements over translation of earlier periods, reflecting the improved skills, professionalism, and intellectual freedom of the translators. Some versions of the Comedy are enriched by illustrations, such as those of Tian Dewang (2002) and Huang Guobin (2009) that boast artwork by Gustav Doré. These translations have now been reprinted many times, revealing contemporary China’s strong interest in Dante and his masterpiece.
After eighteen years of hard work, Tian Dewang published his translations of Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso in 1990, 1997, and 2001 respectively, subsequently publishing them together as one volume with the People’s Literature Publishing House in 2002. His translation, made directly from the Italian, appears in prose style and is faithful to the original. The translation includes extensive footnotes, drawing on research conducted both in China and abroad.
Huang Wenjie’s full translation of the Comedy was published by the Flower City Publishing House and included in the “Italian Literary Classics” series edited by Lyu Tongliu (2000). Since then, Yilin Publishing House (2005a) and Chinese Publishing House (2010) have reprinted it several times. This translation is also from the original, in free poetry style. This version is technically rigorous, drawing on Western forms, for example, marking each line of the poem with a line code. All subsequent translations in poetic style have followed this notation.
Zhang Shuguang, a well-known contemporary poet, published a full translation of the Comedy with the Guangxi Normal University Press in 2005, translated from English and using a free poetic form referencing existing Chinese translations. As a poet, Zhang Shuguang pays heightened attention to the linguistic beauty of his version. His work is simple and powerful. Zhang also added an index to the volume to facilitate academic research.
The Comedy translated by Huang Guobin, a poet in Hong Kong, was published by the Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press in 2009. This translation took more than 20 years. It was translated in terza rima from the Italian and includes a large number of detailed annotations. This translation combines the advantages of Zhu Weiyi’s and Tian Dewang’s versions, both in a literary and academic sense. Yet another translation is Wen Hui’s 2014 prose version of Inferno, which includes a number of notes marred by errors. It has not received much academic attention.
The first anthology of Dante’s work to appear in China is the Selected Works of Dante edited by Lyu Tongliu, which came out in 2004. It includes Vita Nova translated by Wang Duqing, Commedia by Wang Weike, De Vulgari Eloquentia (excerpted) by Liu Hui, Convivio (excerpted) by Lyu Tongliu, Monarchia by Zhu Hong and sonnets translated by Qian Hongjia and Lyu Tongliu. This volume is the best selection of Dante’s work in Chinese to date.
Shen Mo’s translation of Vita Nova was published by Oriental Publishing House in 2007. This work is based on the original Italian text and prints the original as reference, offering invaluable benefits for academic research. In addition, Dante’s biographies by Melezhkovsky, Boccaccio and Bruni were also translated into Chinese, appearing in 2000 and 2008.
Despite this long list of recent translations of Dante’s works into Chinese, there is still room for more translation of Dante’s oeuvre and of Dante studies, as well. Chinese translation of some of Dante’s works are still lacking, such as Quaestio de Aqua et Terra, and many letters and eclogues. A large number of important secondary resources on Dante are still yet to be translated into Chinese.
Teaching Dante in universities
To trace how Dante has been taught in China in the post-Mao period, we can examine references to Dante in textbooks and other pedagogical materials. After the Cultural Revolution, the first foreign literature history textbook to appear was A Compendium of Foreign Literature, published in August 1977. This text did not acknowledge Dante as a pioneer of the Renaissance and denied him and his works any special note. In 1977, Sichuan University gathered scholars from fifteen universities from six provinces across China’s southwest, northwest and south-central region in a conference on foreign literature textbooks. As a result, in February 1980, Guizhou People’s Publishing House published Fifty-five Lectures on Foreign Literature, including Dante’s Comedy as a course. In keeping with the times, the Marxist-inflected analysis was simplistic, yet it did represent a new beginning.
In the early 1980s, under the guidance of the Ministry of Education, syllabi were prepared for several disciplines. In the Syllabus for Foreign Literature Teaching of Higher Normal Colleges published by Beijing Normal University Press in 1982, there is a chapter dedicated to “Literature in the Middle Ages” and a special section entitled “Italian Literature,” mainly introducing Dante’s life and writings, as well as his so-called ideological contradictions. Although Dante was not given his own special section, his work is still highlighted.
Three significant monographs on foreign literature history were produced during this period: History of European and American Literature compiled by Shi Pu (1980), History of European Literature edited by Yang Zhouhan (1964), and A Compendium of Foreign Literature History edited by Zhu Weizhi (1979), all of which include Dante and his works. Shi Pu’s volume originated as a series of lecture notes from her course “Foreign Literature” at the Department of Chinese Literature at Sichuan University in the 1960s. From 1962 to 1965, her work was used as a textbook at Heilongjiang University, Wuhan Normal College, Southwest Normal College and Nanchong Normal College. After the fall of the “Gang of Four” and the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976, her lectures were published by the Sichuan People’s Publishing House in 1980.
Among the monographs on the history of foreign literature in this early post-Mao period, the most influential were those of Yang Zhouhan and Zhu Weizhi. These two were the most popular textbooks before the 1990s. Both analyze Dante from a Marxist perspective of materialism and historical materialism and quote Engels’ comment on Dante: “the last poet of the Middle Ages, while at the same time the first poet of the new era.”
In the early 1980s, the Ministry of Education reaffirmed Dante’s political status in different disciplines, including the history of literature, aesthetics, philosophy, literary theory, and the history of political thought following the guiding principles of Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought. In textbooks for these disciplines, Dante’s historical status was mostly described in terms of his capitalist tendencies under feudalism and emphasized his contradictions during the transition period. For example, Dante’s contribution to language was emphasized in discussions of Western literary theories, whereas his concept of world empire is emphasized in courses on the history of Western political thought. Most of these books were textbooks for liberal arts courses in colleges and universities, compiled under the supervision of the ideologically conservative Ministry of Education.
In the History of Western Philosophy (1983) edited by Quan Zenggu, Dante appears in the section “Philosophy in the Embryonic Period of Western European Capitalist Relations.” Quan writes that Dante, as a writer and philosopher, had humanistic ideas, that is to say, he believed in human freedom and love, but that Dante’s love was tainted by connotations of class. Miao Langshan’s History of Western Literary Theory (1985) gives Dante a special section in his discussion of the Renaissance and refers to him as the originator of national language and literature. The History of Western Political Thought (1985) edited by Xu Datong discusses Dante in the chapter “Political Thought in Western European Feudal Societies” and notes Dante’s opposition to the Catholic church’s notion of world empire. (Qi, 2014: 21) As late as 1995, the Syllabus for the History of Foreign Literature compiled by the State Education Commission’s Higher Education Department included a chapter on medieval literature in which Dante was still being analyzed from the perspective of his “contradictions” during the “transition period” from feudalism to the new age.
In the late 1990s, however, some history of literature textbooks began to appear which differed significantly from the works of the immediate post-Mao period. Zheng Kelu’s History of Foreign Literature (1999) included Lyu Tongliu’s article introducing Dante. The History of European Literature, edited by Li Funing and published in 1999, includes material on Dante in the sixth section of “The Middle Ages” (the “Dante” part of “Dante and Italian Poetry”) that is identical to the material on Dante in Yang Zhouhan’s History of European Literature.
Xu Baogeng’s Fifteen Lectures on Western Literature (2003) is a collection of lectures from the author’s course “Western Literary Trends and Works” given at Tsinghua University, one of China’s most prestigious universities. The fourth lecture is about Dante and his Comedy, focusing on a combination of academic and other aspects of the work, with more personal experience of Xu.
The “must read list” from China’s universities played an important role in Dante’s acceptance. In the 1980s, the Comedy was on some reading lists, such as the Reading List for Students of the Department of Chinese Language and Literature (1986) and the Essential Readings for College Chinese Majors (1986) (Qi, 2014: 24), but not on others. In 2000, the Ministry of Education’s National Committee for Guidance on the Teaching of Chinese Language for Higher Education issued a Specialized Reading List for Undergraduates in the Chinese Departments of Higher Education, which contained a total of 100 books aimed at improving the cultural quality of college students. Each school was expected to include these readings as primary content in major courses. Wang Weike’s translation of the Comedy made the list.
Currently, Dante’s status in Chinese colleges and universities is quite multifaceted. One common trait is that almost all courses involving the history of foreign literature, Italian literature, and Classics of foreign literature include Dante’s works in their syllabi. For instance, in the course “European Culture and Literary Tradition” in the English Department of Peking University, Dante’s Divine Comedy is required reading for the unit on medieval literature. This one-semester course is for undergraduate students in their second and third years. The Department of Comparative Literature has also made the Comedy part of its western literature course.
Second, courses focused on Dante and his works are still relatively scarce. Dante courses are unique to the English Department of Peking University, the Institute for Advanced Studies in Humanities and Social Sciences of Beihang University, the Department of Foreign Languages at Zhejiang University, and the Department of Foreign Languages at Renmin (People’s) University, all top universities in China. Many of these are liberal arts classes. No courses on Dante are currently offered in any Department of Italian Language and Literature.
Third, when Dante’s work is taught in university, the Comedy is the main subject. No other works by Dante are taught individually or in detail. Some colleges and universities also use the Comedy as a main reference text for special topics. For example, in his liberal arts course “Western Political Thought,” Wu Fei of Peking University’s Philosophy Department uses the Comedy to interpret medieval Western political thought. The course “Tarot, European Middle Ages and the Italian Renaissance” by Cheng Mo of the European Institute of Tongji University is a Dante-based elective for science students.
Fourth, textual reading and subject analysis are the main teaching methods for Dante studies, often involving philosophical analysis and the tracing of historical connections. “Dante’s Divine Comedy and Philosophy” by Wu Gongqing of Renmin University, for example, is taught in conjunction with Plato’s Republic, the Bible, and St. Augustine’s Confessions.
Fifth and finally, China still lacks authoritative reference materials and textbooks. The field of Italian literature in China is still in its infancy. Due to the difficulties inherent in Dante studies, scholars often prefer to focus on the study and translation of modern and contemporary works, rather than studying and teaching Dante and his oeuvre. And because there are no authoritative reference materials, teachers can only teach from their own knowledge and research. The production of more reference materials will surely help promote the development of teaching Dante.
Most Chinese students in the PRC have heard of, but do not fully understand, Dante and his works at present. Dante has not been given the in-depth research consideration and the meticulous pedagogical attention his works deserve. In Sino-Italian cultural exchange, as well as in the globalization of Italian literature, Dante is a valuable go-between. The further spread of Dante’s works depends not only on the joint efforts of Chinese and Italian academics and researchers, but also on the further advancement of teaching in universities. It is both reasonable and effective to offer Dante-related courses in institutions for undergraduates offering majors in Italian language and literature. An increase in general education courses on Dante will expand the influence of the poet and his works. Furthermore, the use of online resources to teach Dante should also be encouraged. At present, the Yale open course of Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta, “Reading Dante,” is actually very popular in China. This popularity is evident in many ways; in 2019, Professor Lino Pertile from Harvard University was invited to Beihang University in Beijing for a series of lectures on Dante and his Comedy. China’s students are clearly very interested in Dante but suffer from a lack of resources. In any case, the expansion and deepening of research on Dante is the most powerful guarantee for further expansion of courses on Dante in China.
Conclusion
There is a large gap between research on Dante and his works in China and in other international institutions. Dante studies are still not widespread in China’s classrooms. China needs to deepen its understanding of Dante and his works, and Chinese scholars should continue to add new insights into Dante studies with their unique perspectives. At the same time, international academic exchanges should be strengthened in order to further stimulate cross-cultural dissemination of ideas about Dante and his oeuvre.
As a symbol of the continuous deepening of the global exchange of ideas, the translation, study, and teaching of Dante and his works in China reflect the process of Sino-Italian exchanges in literature and culture. They also reflect social development and change within China, all deeply intertwined with the fortunes of Chinese society. From the early introduction of Dante and his masterpieces as a benchmark of the creation of a national literature, to the way China’s intellectuals began to look outward again in the period of the post-Mao reforms, Dante has provided Chinese intellectuals with a model of national cultural tradition during a period of national transition, but also with an artistic imagination capable of reshaping national cultural self-confidence to communicate with the rest of the world. The introduction, reference, reflection and in-depth study of foreign cultures can be said to be a microcosm of China’s interface with globalization. By including China in the global audience for Dante and his works, this paper has offered a broader global perspective and a more comprehensive and accurate cultural picture of Dante’s reception around the world.
Footnotes
Notes
References
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