This translation exists because of Patrick Olivelle, who, some fifteen years ago or so at the annual meeting of the American Oriental Society in New Orleans in 1998, approached the two of us with a proposition: that we should undertake a quick translation of the R̥ gveda for a general audience. Patrick’s persuasive powers are well known, and we were intrigued and easily persuaded. Although the “quick” element of the proposition was not exactly fulfilled, we wish to thank Patrick abun- dantly for starting us on this path, which has provided both of us with the most sustained and satisfying intellectual experience of our lives, and for his constant encouragement and sage advice along the way.
That we could undertake this project at all is entirely due to our shared guru, Stanley Insler, with whom we first read R̥ gveda in 1971. Stanley’s combination of meticulous philology with inventive interpretation and imaginative reading, never accepting conventional wisdom without scrutiny—however many millennia the conventional wisdom has held—has been a constant inspiration to us. And not only is our general approach to the text entirely informed by his teaching and example, but many of our interpretations of particular passages first saw the light of day in his classes.
Over the years we have read R̥ gveda with several generations of students, many of whom are now colleagues and friends, and other colleagues have read portions of our translation or discussed it with us, offering helpful and trenchant criticism and supportive encouragement. We cannot name them all, but among the many we wish to mention especially Jim Benson, Wendy Doniger, Harry Falk, Ben Fortson, Oliver Freiberger, Arlo Griffiths, Dieter Gunkel, Mark Hale, Hans Hock, Jan Houben, Joshua Katz, Jared Klein, Sasha Lubotsky, Jesse Lundquist, Craig Melchert, Chris Minkowski, Marianne Oort, Asko Parpola, Ted Proferes, Hanns-Peter Schmidt, Gregory Schopen, Martha Selby, Hartmut Scharfe, Oktor Skjaervø, Rupert Snell, George Thompson, Elizabeth Tucker, Brent Vine, and Jarrod Whitaker. We wish to acknowledge also the financial and institutional support that we have received. The National Endowment for the Humanities supported this project through a Collaborative Grant in 2005 that allowed us to work more frequently together during a critical period in our work. Also, we wish to thank both the University of Missouri, which provided Joel a leave to begin this project (during the academic year 1999–2000), and the University of Texas at Austin, which gave him time to continue it (in the fall 2004).
We would also like to thank Oxford University Press and especially Cynthia Read for her continuing support of the project and her patience in awaiting its completion, as well as Charlotte Steinhardt at the Press and Jashnie Jabson, our Production Editor at Newgen Knowledge Works, Chennai, for their help in prepar- ing the manuscript for publication. We want to extend special thanks to Katherine Eirene Ulrich, our skillful, vigilant, meticulous, and, above all, tactful copy-editor, without whose care many slips and infelicities would have remained in the finished version.
Finally, we wish each to give heartfelt thanks to the most significant person in our individual lives. Joel to René Campos, whose patience was often tried during the long period that I worked on this translation. I appreciate his efforts to enliven the parts of my life not given over to the R̥ gveda and thereby to inform the part that has been. Stephanie to my husband, Calvert Watkins, who lived daily with this project for all those years, read innumerable drafts of many of the translations, and whose astounding range of knowledge about Indo-European languages and their poetic traditions and his fine-tuned sense of archaic poetry can be seen as the foundation of every word of my translations. I deeply regret that he did not live to see the translation in print.