The five translations of the Ivo Andrić’s short story The Bridge on the Žepa published during the period of almost seventy years will be analysed with respect to the primary time distance referring to the archaisms woven into the original text and the secondary distance referring to the time separating the original text from the translation. The aim of this paper is to understand the extent to which the lexical and functional stratification of a text distant in real and artistic time can be maintained.