Modalities of the Translation-Ideology Nexus: An Analysis of V. G. Kiernan’s Translation of Iqbal

This intellectually vigorous and critically engaging study provides a cultural and linguistic critique of V. G. Kiernan’s translation of Muhammad Iqbal, the foremost Muslim poet and philosopher, with reference to such larger questions as ideology, power, and discourse, as well as their complicity with the practice of (mis)translation. Providing an illuminating and incisive account of the cultural and linguistic distortions, the book shows how misrepresentations and mistranslations abound in Kiernan’s work. It invites the reader, especially scholars of the field, to pay close attention to the nuances and subtleties of translation, which, in a cumulative way, rewrite the original text in the process of translation. The politics of translation, in apparently innocuous ways, brings about and perpetuates the marginalization and exclusion of non-European works. Contrary to the common view, translation is deeply enmeshed in cross-cultural power struggles and mired in ideological dogmas and preconceptions. In the contemporary world where Islam and Muslims are increasingly portrayed as “cultural others”, the book comes as a timely rejoinder to the domesticated introductions of Iqbal in the West. Read more