The article reconstructs the history of the Italian retranslation of Thomas Mann’s Joseph und seine Brüder. Although Mondadori already published the work (four volumes from 1933 to 1948), shortly after the death of the first translator, the retranslation of the entire tetralogy was commissioned. Based on the letters between the publisher, the author and the new translator, the paper tries to shed light on an unusual case of retranslation, where the rules that generally determine its necessity do not seem to be applicable.