William Franke's approach to world literature takes its orientation from what is unsayable in any tradition whatsoever. The unsayable is where culture borders on the transcendent dimension of the religious, which secularized, globalized society excludes at its peril. Incommensurabilities enable us, paradoxically, to find our common measure. The incommensurable is the possession of none in particular, but rather the condition of possibility of all. It consists minimally in our all being conditioned by one another, by each other's claim on each. Sensitivity to the unsayable or the "apophatic" is most necessary today in order to make world literature a genuine source of mutual self-discovery rather than a steamroller that turns everything into globalized English by the flattening effect of translation. Instead, analogously to Walter Benjamin's "pure language," literature emerges as transhistorical and transgeographical through multidirectional translation.