The world according to PEN and UNESCO : makers of world literature, 1921-1996

This study charts for the first time the complex, always evolving relationship between PEN International (PEN) and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), including its precursor the International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation (ICIC), from 1921 to 1996, focusing on their joint translation policies. Over these 75 years, the three international organisations collaborated with each other to develop and implement literary translation programmes that would foster mutual understanding among peoples and nation-states, though the way they conceptualised 'world literature' diverged over time. Drawing on multiple archives and official publications, this study argues that their joint translation policies concretely shaped, and were shaped by, their official and informal partnerships as PEN championed the role of living writers, and UNESCO the role of literary books, in these programmes. Their collaboration during the 20th century succumbed to and resisted interventions from member states and the pressure of the international marketplace, yielding unexpected or mixed outcomes. Part 1 examines the interwar period when PEN and the ICIC, despite the brevity of their collaboration, set the terms for the prehistory of translation programmes, especially through their debates on national literary languages. Part 2 examines PEN and UNESCO's collaborative projects that prompted each other to engage with Eastern and Western literatures, shaping their post-war world literary visions. Part 3 turns to the most controversial period for PEN and UNESCO when the two, goaded by international politics, began to actively intervene in each other's policymaking while articulating their own independent understanding of world literature and literary rights. Investigating multiple institutional and individual crossings, this study overall reflects on the role of PEN and UNESCO as makers of world literature, tracing their tangled historical developments, fraught implementations of their translation programmes, and competing imperatives underlying their long-running collaboration.