Translating Sardinia into Chinese: How Indirect Translation Affected the Reception of Geographic and Culture-bounds Words in Deledda’s Short Fiction

As in the case of many literary traditions originating from minor countries, in Late Imperial and Early Republican China several Italian literary works reached the Chinese readership through the mediation of foreign translations, mostly composed in English and French, as well as Japanese. Such languages, which Chinese literati and intellectuals had started to master, served as a catalyst and contributed to the diffusion of promising works which were starting to approach the international literary landscape, but were hardly able to reach China in their original form. In this context, also Grazia Deledda’s literary production has been introduced by the early 20th century Chinese translators through indirect translations. Despite being a stimulus to broaden the Chinese literary landscape, such process often compromised the integrity of the original linguistic choices: omissions, domestication and a frequent use of transliterations of realia strongly characterize Deledda’s translations, leading their readers through a winding path which could have compromised the reception of Deledda’s symbolic representation of the universal human psychology. From this perspective, this paper will introduce the first translations of Deledda’s production to show how the Chinese translators’ choices, and their inevitable tie with the medium language, affected a genuine understanding of the rural Sardinian world and its traditional moral values.