L’imbarazzo della traduzione. I giardini cinesi nelle descrizioni dei viaggiatori occidentali

In 1690, Sir William Temple, one of the earlier theorists of the landscape garden and the first to propose the gardens of China as a typological reference for the “irregular” style being developed in England, coined the term “Sharawadgi” to express, albeit vaguely, the aesthetic of irregularity he perceived in Chinese gardens. More solid efforts were made by Western travelers visiting China, who played a crucial role in shaping to the Western idea of the Chinese garden. Between the 17th and the 19th century, their successful and widely published writings contributed to progressively revealing the Chinese garden as an autonomous typology characterized by naturalness, irregularity and variety. The essay examines the attempts by Western travelers to decode the forms of the gardens of China and discusses the rhetorical patterns they used to convey their Western readers an ever more tangible image of the gardens of China.