Landscapes of Return. Italian-Canadian writing published in Italian by ‘Cosmo Iannone editore

Drawing on the work of Arjun Appadurai (1996), this article discusses recent
translations into Italian of Italian-Canadian writing as part of a wider ‘‘landscape’’, centred mainly on the idea of return to the homeland. This landscape consists not only of powerful discourses circulating in Italian cultural institutions and guiding the selection and marketing of the translations of this post-migrant literature, but also of discourses employed by de-territorialized ethnoscapes of Italians in Canada. By presenting paratextual and textual examples relating to these translations, published mainly by Cosmo Iannone Editore in the first decade of the twenty-first century, this article shows how the landscapes of return constructed in Italy differ from those constructed by English-Canadian and French-Canadian publishing houses. Landscapes representing a failed attempt to metaphorically return to the ancestral homeland in Italian-Canadian writing are substituted, in Italy, for landscapes of a nostalgic return home of the migrants to a point prior to their migration.