ed io che sono?

Hi! First of all, thank you for the ask, a very juicy one that could possibly have one talking for hours, but I'm going to disappoint you by saying I actually don't have anything special to discuss on the translations themselves, because despite it being an interesection between my interests I never found enough time to dive into it properly. But when I do, I'll come back to talk about it!

However, I'll still gladly take this chance to blabber a bit on something I find interesting. The topic of the chinese translation of the Divine Comedy has been rolling in my mind since I first read, about two years ago, about a man called Agostino Biagi (1887-1957) in a newspaper article. He is not by any means a famous man, his name actually resurfaced to the public just a few years ago. Biagi has recently been accredited with writing the first translation of the Divine Comedy directly from italian to chinese (the first ever chinese translation was mediated through french), some decades before the official one by Tian Dewang.

The circumstances in which he did it are not entirely clear. He spent his early youth as a franciscan friar by his own choice - at the time it was one of the few means to have a proper education - and he became interested in China's language(s) and culture after meeting some chinese friends at the seminar. He chose to go to China as a missionary in 1902, where he could learn chinese before being sent back to Italy in 1907 after some heavy disagreements on the mission and moreover the Church. He later renounced both the franciscan order and catholicism, becoming an evangelical baptist pastor. After meeting with communist ideals, he became an active anti-fascist militant during Mussolini's regime and organized weekly clandestine classes to teach genoese workers how to read, write and about Karl Marx's Das Kapital. In the 1940s he managed to teach chinese at the University of Genoa for about two years, then in the late 1950s he died in poverty, pretty much forgotten. During his life he wrote in 7 different notebooks about 4 different versions of the Divine Comedy, one in classical chinese and three in guānhuà 官话 (the late-imperial lingua franca of the empire's officials) with different iterations of the metrics. Not only that, but he translated in italian some chinese classics such as Mengzi, Zhuangzi, the Daodejing, parts of the Shijing, the first chapters of Journey to the West, he copied entire classics character by character, he wrote dictionaries, textbooks, essays on religions, on the relations between China and Italy, marxist propaganda. All of this remained hidden for decades.

His name was practically unknown until some years ago. The history of his translation of the Divine Comedy was brought up in 2021 (the 700th anniversary of Dante's death, nonetheless), when his niece donated the whole collection to the Accademia della Crusca, but studies on the topic, and a book collecting them, only started to come out between 2024 and 2025 along with some news and conferences. I find his story extremely compelling, for how turbulent and unusual it was, for how much time he spent into something he clearly loved the most despite not getting any recognition whatsoever, for the fact that his life is truly seeing the light only now.

I'm leaving here some pictures of his manuscripts:

And here a link to browse through one of them, the first to be digitized:

I had a look into the digitized manuscript, the way Biagi translated the structure into Chinese is very impressive. Like in the original, each stanza contains 3 verses and he even managed to keep the ABA BCB rhyme scheme.

However, each line was also condensed into just 4 syllables/characters, which feels fitting for classical Chinese poetry. In fact, this four-syllable meter is wide-spread in the Book of Songs (Shijing, 詩經), the oldest existing collection of Chinese poetry.

The meter and his use of Classical Chinese gives his translation an ancient feeling, which feels appropriate, even if it makes the text a little difficult to read.

Scuffed comparison/retranslation of the first 5 stanzas below the cut