Three Latin Shijings

Three Latin Shijings (3LS) will expand our understanding of relationships between Greco-Roman and Ancient Chinese literature by establishing a new analytical framework that investigates their intertwined influence on early modern literature. European expansion and Jesuit missions (16th–19th c.) saw the ancient languages and literatures of Greece and Rome collide with China’s. Scholars in both Europe and Asia sought to bridge the cultures. Their literary production included translations of Classical Chinese texts into Latin (and European vernaculars) and Chinese translations of Latin/Greek texts, and original writings shaped by both traditions. As access to these intercultural works requires rare combinations of linguistic skills (Chinese & Latin/Greek) and cultural understanding, they have remained understudied, obscuring the dual character of this corpus and its significance within reception of both Greco-Roman and Chinese antiquities.
3LS, the first major step in investigating the crossroads of Greco-Roman and Chinese ‘Classics’, will focus on Latin translations of Chinese poetry. The principal output will be a trilingual critical edition of three Latin translations of the Shijing (Classic of Poetry), a 11th-7th c. BCE anthology central to the Confucian canon, by Jesuit missionaries (Couvreur, Lacharme, Zottoli) [Three Latin Shijings, 1]. The edition will include introduction, English translations, and commentary. There are no English translations of these Latin Shijings or analyses of their strategies for rendering Chinese language and form into Latin for European audiences. 3LS therefore makes accessible to specialists and non-specialists an important source of the global afterlife of Latin and Classical Chinese.
Scholarly interest in Classics beyond Greece and Rome, and Latin beyond Europe, has increased over the past three decades. This ‘global turn’ has also seen a spike in research on Classics and Asia within the last decade. 3LS’s aims and objectives will advance this research. While non-contiguous comparative studies of Classical traditions and modern reception studies of Classics in Asia develop, scholarship largely overlooks the simultaneous, intertwined receptions of Greco-Roman and Chinese antiquities in early modern writing. Current scholarship on this exchange concerns reception of Greco-Roman classics by European Latinists. In the cross-cultural context of Sino-European exchange, however, Classical Reception must account for two antiquities. 3LS proposes a new framework, Cross-Classical Receptions, that recognises the importance of Classical Chinese canon in this exchange, illuminating how both antiquities were compared, combined, and refigured in each other’s terms. 3LS thus offers new cultural perspectives to the history of Classical Reception and Comparative Literature, and new interpretive approaches for neglected areas in Global Latin.  
3LS will establish a new subdiscipline, Cross-Classical Receptions. It is the first element of a wider research project on Latin written in and about East Asia and on the intertwined receptions of Greco-Roman and Chinese ‘Classics’ in early modern writing. The proposed edition will constitute a pilot contribution towards a digital database, Latin Texts and East Asia (LaTEA) [4], which will be developed beyond the funding period. 3LS will allow the Project Lead to gain necessary digital humanities experience to create the research tools for this larger project. Additionally, 3LS will disseminate its findings through workshop proceedings [Readings on Neo-Latin and East Asia, 2] and other papers [3]. 3LS will create a methodological basis and tools for future study of Asian Neo-Latin andCross-Classical Receptions of Greco-Roman and Ancient Chinese literary traditions.