Sienkiewicz’s novel W pustyni i w puszczy (1911) ranks third in the list of this author’s most translated and published works, as long as Italy is concerned. The novel has been adapted as comics long before in Italian (1934) than in Polish (1955). This paper offers an overview on the different Italian translations of this masterpiece of juvenile literature and raises a question that must be answered: given the essentialist, racist, sessist assessments the book is full of, how could it be translated anew in a post-colonial context? The author suggests it could be done either going beyond the adaptation vs translation framework through a “negotiation approach” (Eco) or by intervening on the “thresholds of the text” (Genette), i.e. paratexts such as prefaces, introductions, illustrations. In publishing a new Italian translation of the novel, the outstanding lesson of “contrapuntual reading”, given in Śladami Stasia i Nel (1961) by Marian Brandys some thirty years before Edward E. Said developped this theoretical construct, should nevertheless not be forgotten. By any means