In its first part, the essay deals with some issues related to the Italian translation of Miron Białoszewski’s Pamiętnik z powstania warszawskiego (1970) from a comparative perspective with the American (1977, 2015), French (2002), Spanish (2011), and German (2019) translations. In its second part, the paper reviews the critical reception of the Italian edition (2021) of this classic of twentieth-century Polish literature.

While presenting a wide range of cultural, historical and political factors which have influen-ced the Polish and the American reception of Miron Białoszewski’s A Memoir of the Warsaw Uprising, this article tries to assess the role played in its reception abroad by the fact that the original text existed in several versions (censored and uncensored) and, on its way to print, got fitted out with multiple paratexts (introductions, prefaces and afterwords). Interestingly, there seems to be a connection between these fringe texts, the shaping of the translation as shown by choices made by the translators and editors, the evolving model of what is believed to be the right and proper handling of historical traumas, and the politics of remembrance in diverse historical settings and cultural imaginaries. An in-depth analysis of the details of translation and editorship opens up a series of broader questions about the status of a literary text functioning as evidence of traumatic historic events and the mechanisms of its reception by those directly affected (the family circle) and the people outside (with special attention being paid to the tension between the private and the public, and the normative versus the non-normative).