Written by Rosa Lombardi and Silvia Schiavi.
Image credit: University of Roma Tre by CAPTAIN RAJU/ Wikimedia Commons, license: CC BY-SA 4.0.
Since 2012, Roma Tre University carried out a series of activities to promote the knowledge and dissemination of Taiwanese culture and literature, contributing to the development of Taiwan studies in Italy. Before that, there was very little or no space devoted to Taiwanese literature in Italian universities, and courses in modern and contemporary Chinese literature mainly still deal with Chinese mainland literary production.
Given this scarcity of studies on Taiwan in Italy, Prof. Rosa Lombardi and Dr Silvia Schiavi have promoted and implemented a series of events to raise awareness about the island and foster a better understanding of the Sinophone world through the introduction of Taiwan’s rich culture, history and literature to the students and the general public.
Early projects promoting Taiwan Studies
Thanks to the support given by Taiwan’s Ministry of Culture (MOC) and the Ministry of Education (MOE), several projects were carried out at Roma Tre University, which included film screenings, workshops, and lectures on different topics. Seminars on modern and contemporary Taiwanese fiction and poetry and lectures on Chinese teaching methodology were also organised by Taiwanese linguists. There were also lectures focused on different aspects of Taiwanese culture, such as cinema, calligraphy, tea ceremony, contemporary theatre, and aboriginal dance performances to provide a broader horizon of Taiwanese culture.
Three Spotlight projects were carried out in 2013, 2015, and 2019, along with a three-year project, Taiwan Studies (2013-2016). Over sixty lectures were organised under the Taiwan Studies Project and Spotlight framework, held by internationally renowned scholars, including David Der-wei Wang and Michelle Yeh, Taiwanese writer Wu Yi-Wei, poet Chen Li, Golden Horse Festival director and critic Wen Tien-Hsiang, Taiwan Contemporary Legend Theatre director and artist Wu Hsing-Kuo, and many other scholars from Taiwan.
Several aspects of Taiwanese culture were introduced to allow a better understanding of the island and arouse curiosity among the students.
The study and dissemination of Taiwanese literature started after promoting different aspects of Taiwanese culture. In 2019 Roma Tre hosted an international young scholars’ workshop on Sinophone literature, which was attended by twenty promising scholars from all over the world, including Taiwan.
Moreover, a three-year project of translating, subtitling and screening Taiwanese movies based on literary masterpieces, namely Macrocosmo Taiwan, was launched in 2021, along with lectures by Taiwanese writer Syaman Rapongan and Prof. Su Shuo-Bin, professor of Sociology of literature at the National Taiwan University and former director of the Museum of Taiwan Literature, who gave insights on how to improve the reception of Taiwanese literature in Italy.
The realisation of these projects has led to the launch of a Taiwan literature series directed by Rosa Lombardi and published by Orientalia of Rome, a publisher specialising in Oriental studies. A volume on Taiwan culture edited by Rosa Lombardi was released last December, which collects contributions by European, Italian and Taiwanese scholars on literature, cinema, and the identity question (Voices from Taiwan, 2022). An anthology of short stories by the writer Chu Tien-hsin (Nostalgia of the Brothers of the Military Villages, 2023) has just been published, and two other volumes are expected to come out this year, a volume of Rapongan’s short stories on the mythology of the Tao people (Stories of Baidawan) and an anthology of Chen Li’s poems.
Prof. Lombardi has contributed to the study of contemporary Taiwanese poetry in Italy by publishing translations of poetic anthologies by Xi Murong (The River of Time, Castelvecchi, 2016), Yang Mu (I Came from the Sea, Castelvecchi, 2017) and Chen Li (Microcosms – Modern Haiku, Elliot, 2022) and essays on Taiwan contemporary poetry. Silvia Schiavi has also published essays on Taiwan’s modern poetry and literature.
The Macrocosmo Taiwan Projects Experience
Since 2021, Rosa Lombardi and Silvia Schiavi have co-organised the aforementioned Macrocosmo Taiwan projects, which had two editions in 2021 and 2022 (Macrocosmo Taiwan I and II). The projects aim to spread Taiwanese literature and cinema in Italy through engaging activities mainly conducted by Roma Tre students majoring in Chinese language and literature, which include audio-visual translation and research on Taiwanese movies, authors and literary works.
Those projects aim to introduce Taiwanese literature in a new form that better attracts the attention and interest of the students, who are used to a growing number of films and TV shows and exposed to the imagery of the Internet and smartphones. Watching a screen adaptation inspired by a literary masterpiece might thus be a way to trigger their curiosity toward Taiwanese literature while also getting to a larger audience.
The projects consist of the translation and subtitling of Taiwanese films, the screenings of the translated works, and lectures on Taiwanese literature and cinema given by visiting professors from Taiwan. The movies translated in the years 2021 and 2022 were film adaptations of literary works of the Reading Taiwan Literature (閱讀時光) series launched by the Ministry of Culture in 2015. The two-season series (2015; 2017) includes fourteen movies adapted from well-known masterpieces such as Yang Kui’s The Newspaper Boy, Wu Chuo-Liu’s The Doctor’s Mother and Chu Tien-wen’s Fin-de-Siècle Splendor.
Macrocosm Taiwan I (2021)’s film screenings took place from October to December at Roma Tre University, along with seminars given by writer Syaman Rapongan on Aboriginal and Oceanic Literature.
Macrocosm Taiwan II (2022)’s film screenings were also held during the first semester and accompanied by three lectures on Taiwan’s postcolonial fiction, poetry and cinema delivered by Prof Su Shuo-Bin.
A third project, Macrocosm Taiwan III, was launched last February and will translate, subtitle and screen two documentaries on Taiwanese writers.[1]
The Macrocosm Taiwan projects are successfully reaching the goal of spreading Taiwanese literature in Italy, targeting an audience of academics and non-academics. Film screenings and lectures held in 2021 and 2022 obtained positive outcomes, sparking curiosity and interest amongst the attendees who were stimulated to read the original literary works behind the film adaptations. Students and the general audience have mostly little or no knowledge of Taiwanese culture and literature, being more familiar with Mainland China’s culture. Through the Macrocosm Taiwan project, including the film screenings and the lectures, it was possible to offer a broader perspective on the vast Sinophone universe, promoting a reflection on what is commonly perceived as “China” or “Chinese”.
The projects mentioned above have also allowed the organisation of several activities aimed at BA and MA students. The translation and subtitling task particularly engendered the enthusiasm of students who were given a chance to practice with a new form of translation, obtaining skills in subtitling while also doing close readings on Taiwanese literary works. As a result, several students decided to pursue their research in the field, writing their BA and MA dissertations about Taiwanese literature and cinema.
The projects carried out over the past ten years have obtained good results in increasing the interest of Bachelor’s and Master’s degree students in Taiwanese studies, focusing on literature. In the past five years, nine theses on Taiwan literature have been discussed, four of which were Bachelor’s and five Master’s theses, as well as three PhD dissertations. Moreover, a three-year postdoctoral research fellowship on Taiwan literature was granted in 2021.
Since last year, a course in Taiwanese literature has been started by Prof. Lombardi in the MA programme, and introductory parts on Taiwanese literary history have been introduced in the literature course of the Bachelor’s programme as well.
The next target will be establishing courses entirely focused on Taiwanese literature at Roma Tre. We expanded the range of our Taiwan-focused initiatives by establishing collaborations with various Italian universities. As part of these initiatives, we arranged screenings of noteworthy Taiwanese films and conducted seminars discussing Taiwanese literature. In the future, we plan to create an archive of the materials gathered during all those years and translate short clips from the movies and documentaries to use as open-source teaching material to share among scholars.
The planning of the above-mentioned projects was based on the specific reality of Roma Tre University and the current situation of sinological studies at the university level in Italy. Based on our experience of over ten years, we can note that the activities carried out have been particularly effective because there has been the active involvement of BA, MA and PhD students, who became the ‘main actors’ of the events and contributed to the dissemination of information on organised events through social networks and word-of-mouth advertising. Last but not least, given the scarcity of Taiwan literary works in Italian, promoting Taiwan literature in Italian translation is certainly an indispensable tool to better understand the island’s history and culture, an effort that should be intensified in the future.
The work carried out over the past ten years has been very important in allowing a better knowledge of Taiwanese literature. However, much can still be done through exchanges and collaborations with European colleagues from other institutions that offer more opportunities in this field.
[1] For further information about Macrocosmo Taiwan projects, please visit Roma Tre’s website on Sinophone literature related events: https://acrossthestraitromatre.wordpress.com/.
Rosa Lombardi is a professor of Chinese literature and language at Roma Tre University. Her research field is on modern and contemporary Chinese literature, contemporary Taiwanese poetry, literary translation, and Italian travel literature on China. She has published studies on modern and contemporary Chinese literature and contemporary poetry. She is the author of a volume on Shen Congwen and the Avanguards of the XX century (2018), and recently edited a volume on Taiwan Literature (2022), and one on Zhu Tianxin’s works (2023). She has also translated works by Shen Congwen, Mo Yan, Su Tong, Wang Shuo, Hong Ying, Bei Dao, Han Dong, Jidi Majia, Xi Chuan, Yang Mu, Xi Murong, and Chen Li.
Silvia Schiavi is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Sinophone Language and Literature at the Department of Foreign Languages, Literatures, and Cultures of Roma Tre University. In May 2021, she obtained her PhD with a dissertation on modern Taiwanese poetry focused on the introduction of Modernism to Taiwan by the mainland Chinese poet Ji Xian. Her main fields of research include Taiwan and Chinese Modernism, Taiwan Literature, Sinophone Poetry and Audio-visual Translation. Her latest publications include essays on Taiwanese poetic Modernism of the 1930s and 1950s and Nativist literature.
This article was published as part of a special issue on European Association of Taiwan Studies.
Taiwan Insight 
