The Servant Jernej and His Justice in Italian. Observations on the Italian Versions of the Best-Known
Short Story by Ivan Cankar
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 njegova pravica (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.
