Soon after its first publication in 1946, the novel Life and Times of Alexis Zorba (alias Zorba the Greek) by the Greek writer Nikos Kazantzakis became one of the few works of Modern Greek literature to manifest itself, in David Damrosch's words, as a "mode of circulation and of reading". The present paper investigates the novel's entry into the sphere of 'world literature' from the perspective of its circulation by focusing on the incremental relay operations (in Paris, London, and New York) that networked Zorba the Greek semantically and lent, at every step of the trajectory, a specific sociocultural dimension to its public profile. The book's (relay) translations offer a heuristic opportunity to reassess how Βίος και πολιτεία του Αλέξη Ζορμπά turned into Zorba the Greek and joined Henry Miller's The Colossus of Maroussi (1941) as a literary guide to contemporary Greece as early as in the late 1940s and early 1950s, well before the famous Hollywood movie adaptation (1964).