When in 1827 Goethe declared “National literature is now rather an unmeaning term; the epoch of world literature is at hand, and everyone must strive to hasten its approach” he had been long engaged in reading Persian, Chinese, and other non-Western literary works in translation. Goethe was so profoundly moved and inspired by Hafiz’s poetry that he wrote his own collection of poems, Die West-Östlicher Divan (The West-Eastern Divan. The worldliness of Persian literature acknowledged and embraced by Goethe has since been repeatedly confirmed in flows and exchanges between Persian and Western literatures. In this presentation, I would like to focus on one example of such circulation: the transmutation of Franz Kafka’s novella Die Verwandlung (The Metamorphosis) in Iran. Kafka’s novella was first introduced to Iranians in 1950 through a Persian translation by Sadeq Hedayat, arguably modern Iran’s most prominent and influential literary figure. Well over three decades later in 1989, a renowned Iranian translator, Farzaneh Taheri, published a new translation of The Metamorphosis. Taheri’s translation was followed by Manuchehr Bigdeli Khamseh’s in 2008. Between these two translations in 2000, Mostafa Eslamieh, a writer and translator, published a novella entitled The Continuation of Metamorphosis or the Return of Gregor Samsa. I will argue that these translation and the rewriting of The Metamorphosis, demonstrate how Persian literati have engaged with the concept of world literature. Drawing both on theories of translation and the conceptualizations of world literature, my analysis will reveal how the instances of relay translation paved the way for The Continuation of The Metamorphosis, or the Return of Gregor Samsa. I will analyze this reworking of Kafka’s novella as a metaphor for reimagining Iran’s current cultural isolation and a reanimation of imaginative transfers and exchanges that have long placed Persian within the currents of world literature.