Translation is the paradoxical condition of possibility for connecting different speech communities and literary cultures. Mario de Andrade’s self-discovery by way of translation illustrates the necessary link between translation and world literature. Each language and national context has its own peculiarities with respect to translation, depending on its relative position in the exchanges among print-based literatures. The sequencing of translational events shows how more influential target languages enable translation into smaller target languages. The event of translation intervenes in the duration of the work, sometimes decisively. The early anglophone translations of Bertolt Brecht intervened in the emergence of Bertolt Brecht’s work as world literature in such a way that more durable translations, and a more durable “Bertolt Brecht,” could be constructed and consecrated within anglophone cultures. The cosmopolitan desire of readerships is nonetheless generated at the crossroads where ideology, economics and aesthetic traditions meet.