This essay examines how translation theory can globalize contemporary literary comparison. Whereas Persian studies has historically been isolated from the latest developments within literary theory, world literature has similarly been isolated from the latest developments within the study of non-European literatures. The methodology of hard translation developed here can develop these links. Hard translation incorporates translation in the form of exegesis, while preserving traces of the source language in the target language. Coined in 1929 by the Chinese critic, writer and translator Lu Xun, hard translation (yingyi) is here considered alongside Walter Benjamin’s cognate and nearly contemporaneous arguments for translation in a context of linguistic incommensurability.