This article interrogates Marx's remarks of 1857-1858 on translation, in light of the history of translation and transmission of texts and ideas in ancient, medieval and modern Eurasia. Marx wrote: "It is no less wrong to compare language with money. When expressed in language, our ideas do not change in such a way that they lose their own characteristics, but retain their social character, like prices next to commodities. Ideas do not exist separately from language. When, for the sake of transmission, an idea needs to be translated from its mother tongue into some foreign language, in order to make it exchangeable, then the comparison is more appropriate; but the comparison is not with language, but with its foreignness."__Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Ökonomie; in: MEGA2 II/1(2006):95.
These words of Karl Marx (1818-1883) are true not only for the history of translation and transmission of his own ideas and texts through the ideological filters of various marxisms, but also for the ideas of Pāṇini (c. 5th century BCE) through their Brahminical commentaries, those of Aristotle (384-322 BCE) through the Greek, Arabic, Persian, Latin and modern European Aristotelianisms , and those of Leibniz (1646-1716) through German and other European Leibnizianisms, which have been and continue to be variously translated and transformed till date.
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