Based on an analysis of the Siegfried Unseld Archive in Marbach, this article aims to make visible the "realpolitik" of the circulation of literatures with a focus on Brazilian literature between 1960 and 1990 in West Germany. It traces the steps and the process of modelling Brazilian modern literature and shows how the Suhrkamp publishing house, which set out to establish and model a "world literature" according to purely literary criteria (of modernism), in relation to non-European literatures – such as Brazilian literature – still pursued a practice of forming cultural reception modules – such as 'Latin American literature'. Additionally, it explores how the publishing house tried to find a solution in the case of Brazilian literature, which did not fit exactly and could not be subsumed so easily. It shows how, in this context, the cultural and topographical concept of the "sertão", otherwise regarded as the topos of a national founding myth of the brasilidade, can be extracted, through the analysis of Suhrkamp's publication criteria and the isolated contour of Brazilian literature in its programme, as a concept of reception in which untranslatability functions as an epistemological fulcrum. Through this interpretation, the article attempts to escape the narrative of a universalist history of 'world literature' – according to Eurocentric criteria of polarisation between centre and periphery, North and South – and, rather than telling the story of a successful appropriation of foreign culture and literature, it describes a history of reception through untranslatable asymmetries of literature itself.