This brief essay presents, in the light of textual material, some of the strategies and procedures implemented by individual translators to bring the best-known work by Ivan Cankar, Hlapec Jernej in njegovapravica (1907), to the Italian reading public. The three versions available to date cover the period ranging from 1925 to 1978 and bear witness to the interest this story has aroused at home and abroad since its publication, but at the same time a more detailed analysis of the texts only serves to highlight how the efforts by Italian translators, albeit creditable, do not render full justice to a short story that has a special place in the literary and cultural history of Slovenia.