107The Earliest Latin and Spanish Translations of the Confucian Four Books : Old and New Perspectives

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between their moral precepts and Western ethics.A relatively large corpus of early Jesuit translations of Confucius' books is extant, ranging from manuscript translations dated from the end of the 16 th century to versions printed between 1662 and 1711.3 However, it is difficult to ascertain which of the two Jesuits, Ruggieri or Ricci, was the first to translate the Four Books, because the material evidence that has survived does not always corroborate the information we find in the letters they wrote to their fellow Jesuits during their time in China.In several letters to two different correspondents, Ricci states that he made a translation of the Four Books, and we can infer from his correspondence that he began this task in early 1593; that by 10 December of the same year he had translated three works (presumably Daxue, Zhongyong, and Lunyu); and that he had produced a translation of the fourth book by November 1594. 4 We can also surmise from this correspondence that Ricci was sufficiently familiar with the Four Books to explain them to another fellow Jesuit; and that he had been helped by Chinese "good masters" (buoni maestri) to read and interpret them.5 Finally, we know from Nicolas Trigault's De Christiana expeditione apud Sinas (published in 1615, but based on Ricci's own diaries in Italian) that the Jesuits who later came to China used Ricci's Latin paraphrase to learn Chinese culture.6 Ricci's translation was probably the basis for subsequent printed versions.David E. Mungello has hypothesized that the 17 th -and 18 th -century printed Jesuit translations, and more specifically Prospero Intorcetta's 1687 Confucius Sinarum philosophus, could be the latest version of a collaborative process of revision whereby Ricci's translation "was handed down and improved by later Jesuits".7 However, to date, no manuscript containing Ricci's version has been identified � These translations include: Sapientia Sinica (Da Costa/Intorcetta 1662, the first Latin translation of the Daxue and first five chapters of Lunyu), Sinarum scientia politico-moralis (Intorcetta 1667-1669, the first Latin translation of the Zhongyong), Confucius Sinarum philosophus (Intorcetta et al. 1687, which includes Daxue, Zhongyong and Lunyu), and Sinensis Imperii libri classici sex (Noël 1711, containing the complete Latin translations of all the Four Books).See Lippiello (2020).

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