Quando confucio parlava latino: Prospero Intorcetta mediatore culturale

Abstract

This paper presents an analysis of the Latinity of Prospero Intorcetta (1625-1696), a Sicilian Jesuit who was sent to China as a missionary in 1657. Initially devised to teach his fellow missionaries Chinese,his Latin translations ultimately introduced Confucian thought to Europe. Concretely, this paper seeks to investigate both Intorcetta’s translation technique and the sources he used regarding a passage from Confucius’s Analecta(II.4) as presented in the SapientiaSinica(1662). From such an analysis, the team has ascertained that the filter through which Intorcetta chose to convey Confucian thought seems to have been Thomistic Latin tempered primarily through the paradigm of Augustinian thought and the Italian lyric tradition.