World literature has recently been critiqued for its normative, world-making force and, not unrelatedly, for its genealogical ties to orientalism. This article shifts the focus in world literature from the ‘world’ to the ‘literature’ by suggesting that within a nexus of politics, religion and knowledge production, the stylistic requirements of literature were fundamental to the reification of numerous performative modes that were not predicated exclusively on language's semantic dimensions. Literature, as a ‘vanishing mediator’, thus enabled not only translations but also comparative valuations – philological, mythological and racial – of entire cultures in an unethical epistemological encounter. Through the examination of the circuitous route of the Sāvitrī myth, which was translated from Sanskrit into Italian, English, French and German as ‘dramatic literature’, and finally to Gujarati as a play for theatrical production, this article uncovers performance's potential to problematize the figuring of text as world-encompassing entity.

中文翻译：

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从印度到印度：文学的表演性超凡脱俗

世界文学最近因其规范性、创造世界的力量而受到批评，而且并非不相关，因为它与东方主义的系谱联系。本文将世界文学的焦点从“世界”转移到“文学”，提出在政治、宗教和知识生产的联系中，文学的文体要求是众多表演模式具体化的基础仅在语言的语义维度上。文学作为“正在消失的中介”，因此不仅能够在不道德的认识论遭遇中对整个文化进行翻译，而且能够对整个文化进行比较评价——语言学、神话学和种族。通过考察从梵文翻译成意大利文、英文的 Sāvitrī 神话的迂回路线，