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The Rig Veda Review

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This is a convenient digital version of a late-nineteenth-century (1889, revised 1896) translation, very out of date but not hopelessly obsolete; and so far the only complete English-language version of the whole of the "Rig Veda," (very roughly, "Verses Knowledge"), over a thousand hymns, grouped in ten mandalas ("circles") or, roughly, books (but they are traditionally conceived of as heard and recited, not written).

The Rig Veda, or Rg-Veda Samhita (the "r" with an under-dot; Samhita means "collection"), is generally considered as the oldest of the Four Vedas, the basic canonical "texts" (officially transmitted orally) of ancient India, which are regarded as sacred by all orthodox modern Hindus, and even heterodox sects; the other three being the Yajur- (sacrificial formula), Sama- (chants), and Atharva- (a priestly class) Vedas. (This is, it must be said, something of a circular definition; traditionally, "Heretics" are those who deny the authority of the Vedas, and other Indian religions, such as Buddhism, are included in the category.)

Conventional dating puts the composition of the contents between about 1200 and 900 B.C.E.; a little leeway on either side may be needed. But recent claims for millennially greater antiquity can't be reconciled with the evident relationships to other languages, and are often "rationalized" adaptations of the pious view that the verses are eternal, and self-revealing, manifesting to human and divine Sages in every cycle of existence, so that giving them a date is pointless.

There are additional "Vedas," including the medical Ayur-Veda, of lesser status, and, confusingly to the uninformed, several huge bodies of literature which are also called by the term (like the restricted and general uses of "Torah" in traditional Jewish discourse). The Brahmanas, Aranyakas, and Upanishads, originally at least formally commentaries on the Samhitas, are also Vedas, which is easy enough to grasp, and the classical epics (Mahabharara, Ramayana) are often classed as a "Fifth Veda." But a variety of mythological and legal texts, not all of them considered truly canonical by all Hindus, are often rather vaguely "Vedic," too.

Indeed, it seems that an Indian politician who announces that a policy "is in accordance with the Vedas" may be referring to something somewhere in any one of a vast number of texts, or to none in particular. (American parallels to such vague claiming of religious sanction may come to mind.)

This is outlined in most books on Hinduism, or Indian civilization or literature; there are also many advanced treatments. A fascinating survey is offered in Barbara A. Holdrege's "Veda and Torah: Transcending the Textuality of Scripture" (1996), which details traditional concepts of the status of the Vedas and the extensions of usage, in a comparative context.

Western scholars generally prefer to use the term as narrowly as possible, and tend to give the most weight as evidence to the Rig Veda, pointing out that the other three are either liturgical arrangements of its verses ("ric" = verse, hence the name), with ritual or musical instructions, or a re-arrangement of hymns with some limited new material (the Atharva Veda).

The hymns were traditionally preserved by oral recitation and memorization, and writing them down was long considered a sacrilege, but elaborate checks seem to have preserved the archaic language -- better called "Vedic" than the systematized Sanskrit of later times -- with remarkable accuracy.

Outside of a handful of words and phrases on cuneiform tablets they are the oldest form of any Indo-Iranian language, and rival the Hittite texts (of the extinct Anatolian branch) as the oldest extant Indo-European literature. The somewhat less archaic Avestan Persian, itself of uncertain date, and a limited number of Greek words and sentences in Linear B are the closest examples from ancestors of other, living, Indo-European languages of similar antiquity. In Griffith's time, only the Persian evidence was available.

The language is regarded as extremely difficult, not least because the vocabulary has become encrusted with later associations, but the lyric beauty of some portions survives translation.

I have reviewed Wendy Doniger's translation of 108 of the 1028 hymns for the Penguin Classics (re-released in 2005, as "The Rig Veda," originally published in 1981 as "The Rig Veda: An Anthology," by Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty), and have considered some of the interpretive issues there (in slightly different forms for the two editions). I cannot too highly recommend it as an introduction to modern Vedic studies, and a charming translation in its own right; although some feel differently about its approach to a sacred text.

The present translation is radically different on several counts; extent, choice of English style, and age of scholarship. All must be taken into account, along with Kessinger's treatment of the work.

The first publication of an English translation of a substantial part of the Rig Veda, by H.H. Wilson, began in 1850, with the sixth and final volume in 1888, and it deserves the respect due to the work of pioneer. At the time Wilson started working, the main guide was the inherited tradition of interpretation in India, incredibly important, brilliant and truly scientific on the grammatical and phonological side, but also pietistic, and committed to the view that they were an a-historical revelation. This was combined with the still-emerging science of comparative philology, itself being created on largely Indian foundations, and a mixture of Christian (and disapproving) and Romantic (and partly uncomprehending) views on the nature and history of Indian religion.

This edition, however, is based on the 1889 translation of R.T.H. Griffith, revised in 1896-1897 (two volumes). It had the advantage of (among other advances) starting with Max Mueller's critical text (edited 1849-1874; second edition, four volumes, 1890-1892), which was so good it is still considered a standard class-text edition in American universities (or, to my knowledge, was in the 1980s), and remains a basic reference. The Griffith translation aimed at being complete; although some passages, and even hymns, considered too offensive for the Victorian public, seem at first glance to have been omitted, Griffith tucked them away in an appendix, offering Latin renderings, and sometimes H. H. Wilson's pre-existing English. (Griffith may have been prudent, rather than prudish. A few decades later, translators of the early volumes of the Loeb Classical Library cautiously turned Greek into Latin, and Latin into French or Italian, in order to conceal sex and other bodily functions in "the decent obscurity of a learned language." The results for say, Ovid, were rather amusing.) Elsewhere, Griffith instead offers euphemistic or evasive translations.

Less happily, Griffith's translation was also under the influence of Mueller's "Solar Mythology" interpretation of the long-enigmatic poems, itself based on a major Sanskrit commentator, although, fortunately, modified in a "Nature Mythology" direction which was less Procrustean in stretching the evidence. This approach was common in his time, and not without some merit; how much it influenced parts of Griffith's translation is made evident in his generally extremely valuable notes, identifying names of gods and humans, plants and animals (not always correctly), and supplying information and cross-references on dozens of other topics.

Unfortunately, the notes have all been omitted from the Kessinger edition, along with any other helpful features, although two brief appendices have been included. (The notes were included in a one-volume Book-of-the-Month Club edition in 1992, the version I have used for years; see "Hinduism: The Rig Veda (Sacred Writings)" by Ralph T.H. Griffith for the Amazon listing. It omits the original index, which makes the searchable Kessinger version very helpful.)

The English of the translations is not only formal, but pseudo-Biblical, signaling a "reverential" approach to Griffith's original readers, but probably just annoying to most moderns, and an obstacle to some. Griffith's work is seriously out-of-date on some levels, including both changes in linguistic theory and a vastly expanded knowledge of ancient India through archeology. His ideas about mythology and religion are, as mentioned, obsolete by several generations; although the most overt expressions of these have ideas have vanished along with the notes, they did influence his translation, and should be kept in mind.

However, it does offer completeness, and frequently reflects traditional understandings of the hymns; so it retains considerable usefulness if used with caution.

This Kessinger edition appears to be carefully produced, and free of the blundering mingling of text and notes which has marred the publisher's reproduction of some other nineteenth-century editions; the simple lack of notes making this much easier to avoid, of course! Conventionalized spellings, without the diacritical marks (accents, etc.) used by Griffith, have been adopted. This will be a problem to those who know enough to see that important information is being lost, but, so far as I have been able to determine, special characters have just been replaced by ordinary versions, and not vanished entirely, as in some Kessinger editions. There may have been some errors, perhaps in the form of simple typographical errors, along the way; although I have only spotted them in English; for example "makcst" for "makest."

One major problem has turned up in my inspection. Book VIII has an appendix, the Valakhilya, in one traditional arrangement, which Mueller inserted among the usual 92 hymns instead, with the numbers 49-59. Griffith put them in their alternate position, at the end of the "Mandala," but with Mueller's numbers attached as well. In the Kessinger edition, the "Valakhilya" title sort of blends in with VIII.92, verse 14 at the bottom of a page. This presentation is certain to be confusing to someone, and suggests that there may be some similar errors in digitalizing the copy that I have missed.

A more obvious annoyance, one all too frequent in digital editions, is that the pages have no running book or hymn numbers, making it necessary to skip around to figure out exactly where one is. And, also as usual, the numbering of the text pages is offset from the number of PDF pages, and one has to recognize that there is a problem in order to adjust. There are two hyperlinked tables of contents, that supplied by Kessinger, and a version from the original text, which is just needlessly confusing, and a mark of inattention. Neither version of the Contents includes the Appendices; you just have to go all the way to the end to discover them, or know in advance to look for them.

Still, the price is right. For all the age of the translation, and the omissions (by Griffith and Kessinger both), the ability to search the text electronically is invaluable. Unfortunately, the standard Kessinger protection against copying makes selecting, copying, and pasting text impossible, so the user will still have to copy quotations letter-by-letter, the old-fashioned way. Digireads offers a much higher-priced digital Rig Veda translation; unfortunately, without information on the translator, or on features. The Rig Veda (Sanskrit: ṛg-vedá, a compound of ṛc "praise, verse" and veda "knowledge") is an ancient Indian sacred collection of Vedic Sanskrit hymns dedicated to the gods (devas). It is counted among the four canonical sacred texts (śruti) of Hinduism known as the Vedas. Some of its verses are still recited as Hindu prayers, at religious functions and other occasions, putting these among the world's oldest religious texts in continued use. It is one of the oldest extant texts of any Indo-European language. Philological and linguistic evidence indicate that the Rigveda was composed in the North-Western region of the Indian subcontinent, roughly between 1700–1100 BC (the early Vedic period). There are strong linguistic and cultural similarities with the early Iranian Avesta, deriving from the Proto-Indo-Iranian times, often associated with the early Andronovo (Sintashta-Petrovka) culture of ca. 2200-1600 BC.

Ralph Thomas Hotchkin Griffith (1826-1906), scholar of indology, B.A. of Queen's College was elected to the vacant Sanskrit Scholarship on Nov 24, 1849. He translated the Vedic scriptures into English. He also produced translations of other Sanskrit literature, including a verse version of the Ramayana and the Kumara Sambhava of Kalidasa. He held the position of principal at the Benares College in India. His translation of the Rigveda follows the text of Max Müller's six-volume Sanskrit edition. His readings generally follow the work of the great scholar Sayana who was Prime Minister at the court of the King of Vijaynagar - in what is now the District of Bellary in the Indian state of Karnataka - in the fourteenth century. - Wikipedia