The Rig Veda (Penguin Classics) [Paperback]

This is a re-issue, in Penguin's current format, and with new cover art, of the Penguin Classics volume previously listed by Amazon as "The Rig Veda: An Anthology of One Hundred Eight Hymns," published in 1981 (and as of October 2005, confusingly still available from Amazon), as translated and edited by Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty. That was her married name, since dropped, to the accompaniment of endless bibliographic and bookselling confusion. She is now known as Wendy Doniger, and is the "Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor of the History of Religions" at the University of Chicago. (She has reported receiving mail with interesting combinations of names and titles.)

Upon inspection, the "new edition" is revealed to be one of Penguin's cosmetic re-packagings to make the whole line uniform (and mostly quite handsome), and not one of the revised editions which have also been appearing as part of the same project. I offer here, with some modifications, my review of the 1981 edition (itself previously reissued in a larger format, with new cover art, some years ago, but also not otherwise changed).

Meanwhile, I suggest trying the Amazon page for the older edition of "The Rig Veda: An Anthology..." if you are interested in a variety of responses by over a dozen other reviewers. And, again, don't let the title and name variations suggest that they are different books, of exactly the same length, from the very same publisher! (As a matter of fact, the actual front-cover title of these editions has been just "The Rig Veda" all along.)

Under any form of her name, Wendy Doniger is a distinguished interpreter and translator of Vedic and classical Sanskrit texts, and of Indian religions in general. Her books are often witty, and at times quite dense with detail. She fully appreciates the playfulness of many versions of Hindu stories of the gods. ("Play" being in fact an explicit theme in some of them.)

In this volume she presents a selection of very ancient poems, in quite readable translations, and backs them up with detailed interpretive and bibliographic notes. It is a first-rate introduction to a very difficult body of literature, which, like the Bible and the Koran, is held sacred by a very large number of people. It is an intriguing and attractive look at the hymns and songs of ancient India, although this volume is at best an adjunct to an appreciation of the living religion, which certainly regards The Four Vedas (Rig, Yajur, Sama, and Atharva) as its basic canonical texts, but looks very different indeed to outsiders from the ancient beliefs and practices in archaic Sanskrit.

Unfortunately, like the Koran, the Vedas are traditionally memorized, recited, cited, and sometimes explained, but not translated, which makes this book religiously problematic. Turning the mystical sounds of Sanskrit into readily intelligible words seems to strike some as sacrilege. At best, devotional readings are the only acceptable renderings. To the apparent distress of some true believers, Wendy Doniger tries to reconstruct what the poems meant when they were first recited, mainly (according to the early Sanskrit supplementary texts, the Brahmanas and Aranyakas) to accompany rituals; although some seem to have had other contexts.

This is not their meaning to present-day Hindus, over three thousand years later, which would be an interesting topic in itself; but two of the other four canonical Vedic Samhitas (collections) are verses of the Rig Veda arranged for such liturgical use, so the attempt to apply this information to the poems is not some strange leap in logic by foreigners. Nor is the rigorous use of comparative grammar and analysis of sound-changes -- this was a science which really can be said, quite fairly, to have been learned by Europeans from the Sages of India, even if they have applied it in unexpected and non-traditional ways.

Now, this is exactly what critical scholarship is supposed to be about. Anyone who finds in it a specific bias against Hinduism might take a close look at an issue of, say, "The Journal of Biblical Literature." Christians and Jews having been doing this sort of thing with their own sacred texts for a couple of hundred years (actually, although sporadically, rather longer).

Now, I haven't studied Sanskrit. But I *have* compared her versions of a number of famous hymns to earlier English translations, to relatively recent treatments of passages in academic journals, and to transliterated Sanskrit texts (and also citations and variants outside the Rig Veda, traced in the digital version of Bloomfield's "Vedic Concordance"), and even to the highly regarded German translation by Geldner (not a lot of help for me there...). I found that her renderings tend to be a bit sparse, or at least concise, compared to most, but she uses headnotes and end notes to fill up gaps by explaining implications, instead of interpolating extra words or phrases to make clear her understandings of passages.

So I can't agree that she is willfully misrepresenting the originals.

No, I think that the main problem with the volume, as the translator would probably acknowledge, is that it will leave the (non-devotional) reader hungry for more. There are only 108 (a sacred number) out of a canon of 1,028. She chose some of the most attractive poems, including most of the famous ones, and presented them in language free of late-Victorian pseudo-Biblical idioms. Although sometimes (not always) too formal to be truly colloquial -- we are, after all, looking at formal compositions, many very clearly ceremonial! -- they are hardly in what Hank Heifetz (a co-winner of the Ramanujan Book Prize for Translation of South Asian Languages) has called "Indologese," either.

Unfortunately, most of the other English versions, and all of the more-or-less complete ones, belong to the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and, besides these literary faults, are a century or so out of date; although still reprinted, even (or especially) in India. The e-book "Rig Veda" offered by Amazon from digiread may be the R.T.H. Grifffith translation of 1889, revised in 1896. The Kessinger e-book is Griffith's version, and, as I have described in a separate review, has the complete hymns, with some passages relegated by the translator to an appendix, but it omits the translator's valuable running notes. There was a one-volume Book-of-the-Month Club edition of it in 1992, with both all of the hymns and notes, and some appendices but apparently without some of Griffith's other apparatus; see "Hinduism: The Rig Veda (Sacred Writings)" by Ralph T.H. Griffith for the Amazon listing. (One hopes the digireads version isn't the incomplete H.H. Wilson rendering, the first installments of which are from 1850!)

Readers without Sanskrit, like me, can neither rely upon these and other old translations, nor easily find corrections for specific passages. Many pieces that aren't included in this Penguin selection are only too likely to be missed by those of us who have seen references to particular hymns, and would like to have a better idea of what they are about. But I'm grateful to have what is here.

Readers should be advised that I come to the topic of Indian culture with almost no background, having read only M. Hiriyanna, _Outlines of Indian Philosophy_, and what I can find about the Rig Veda on the Internet. Indeed, prior to my inquiry, I had thought "Agni" the name of an Indian guided missile! Readers should also know my prejudices: I hesitate with Oriental religions, for many of them in my country have been popularized by the religion of Californianity, and doubtless have been so distorted. I am also favorably prejudiced toward liturgical religions, and thus I've read about Shinto with some interest. I also hold the opinion that India will play no small role in the coming years; to inform oneself of her cultural roots is not time wasted.

For anyone who wishes a contemporary and historical-critical abridgement of the Rig Veda, it seems that Doniger's work will do. Indeed, it will have to do, for I can find nothing in English equivalent to it, and Doniger should be thanked for her efforts. I should tell devout Hindus that I am aware of the limitations of the historical-critical method with respect to what is held to be Scripture - the limitation, while providing the _Sitz im Leben_ of a text in its past, of _leaving_ that text in that past. Yet this method also has its virtues. Indeed, if this abridgement has any faults, it is that I would have liked to have read even more about the culture of the Rig Veda's authors. I would also have liked to have learned more about the period's liturgical practice, for the Rig Veda, like the Psalms, is a collection of hymns to be used in the liturgy. In particular, Was the sacrifice _do ut des_? Did the liturgy have implications beyond _do ut des_, such as (like the Catholic-Orthodox _cultus_) a _mysterion_, i.e. an actual participation is the life of the god? And then there's Soma: drug culture or Eucharistic?

These reservations aside, and they are minor reservations, and with the proviso that I can in no way evaluate the fidelity of her translation, still no reader can complain about Doniger's annotation. She has chosen 108 hymns; it seems that the majority are from Books I and X. Each hymn has a brief preface, and then is copiously footnoted. At the end of her work, she has provided a glossary and index combined, a list of the hymns both by book and by opening Sanskrit phrase, and comments made on other translations and on bibliography.

Doniger did this work in the latter third of the 20th Century, and two of that century's hot topics, women's issues and sex, are slightly accentuated, but never overdone. Nor does she disparage overtly other religions. This work as a whole seems scholarly, and is certainly at the same time user-friendly.

Now let's pray that a scholarly historical-critical translation into English of the entire Rig Veda will soon appear - one just as well annotated.

Don't read this translation. It will give you a completely false idea of these marvelous ancient texts. Instead read:
Rgveda for the Layman: A Critical Survey of One Hundred Hymns of the Rgveda, With Samhita-Patha, Pada-Patha and Word-Meaning and English Translation (Hardcover) - which is available on Amazon. Shyam Ghosh is brilliant. In fact anything he wrote is well worth reading! He understands these verses in the context of something close to quantum physics. Very enlightening and fun!