The English Bhagavad Gita

This book examines English translations and transcreations of the Bhagavad Gita, one of the most sacred and influential texts in Hinduism, exploring how textual transfers, affected by languages, cultures, and time, reconfigure the Gita’s content and meaning, thus transforming it.

Thought to be the first academic volume to apply a comparative methodology to English renderings of the Bhagavad Gita, the book differentiates between widely accepted ‘equivalent’ translations, and creative re-imaginings of the text in the form of transcreations. Chapters explore conversations that occur in translation: both between the Gita and its interpreters, and among various translated versions of the text. By employing a novel analytical framework, termed the ‘dialectic of intimacy’, the book examines how translators negotiate their personal, cultural, and ideological closeness to, or distance from, the text. Ultimately expanding textual transfer beyond simple linguistic equivalence, the book demonstrates the Bhagavad Gita in English as a site of continuous transformation shaped by linguistic, cultural, and ideological influences, and argues for its enduring legacy.

Presenting a novel contribution to scholarship by focusing on The Bhagavad Gita’s reception through translation and transcreation, this book will benefit scholars, researchers and postgraduate students in the fields of translation studies, religious studies and postcolonial studies, as well as comparative literature. The book also invites readers interested in how sacred texts travel across languages and time, and how textual transformations emerge in that journey.