India has a magnificent tradition of religious literature stretching over three and a half millennia, with a vast range of styles and subjects—from almost impersonal reflections on the mysteries of the cosmos, the divine, and humankind’s relation to them to deeply intimate expressions of worship. This literature is justly cele brated, not only within the religious traditions that gave rise to the various works but around the world among people with no ties to those religious traditions. The R̥gveda is the first of these monuments, and it can stand with any of the subse quent ones. Its range is very large—encompassing profound and uncompromising meditations on cosmic enigmas, joyful and exuberant tributes to the wonders of the world, ardent praise of the gods and their works, moving and sometimes painful expressions of personal devotion, and penetrating reflections on the ability of mor tals to make contact with and affect the divine and cosmic realms through sacrifice and praise. Thus, much of what will distinguish later Indian religious literature is already present in the R̥gveda. Yet, though its name is known, the celebration of the R̥gveda is muted at best, even within its own tradition, and, save for a few famous hymns, its contents go unnoticed outside of that tradition.
India also has a magnificent literary tradition, characterized in great part by sophisticated poetic techniques and devices and a poetic self-consciousness that glories in the transformative work that words can effect on their subjects. Again, the R̥gveda is the first monument of this literary tradition and at least the equal of the later literature. The exuberance with which the poets press the boundaries of language in order to create their own reflection of the complex and ultimately impenetrable mysteries of the cosmos and the verbal devices they developed to mir ror these cosmic intricacies resonate through the rest of the literary tradition. Yet, again, the R̥gveda figures very little in standard accounts of Indian literature and is little read or appreciated as literature.
Thus the R̥gveda is not only the beginning but also one of the paramount expressions of both the religious tradition and the literary tradition, combining these two roles in a text that displays great variety, skill, and beauty. Surely it deserves a modern English translation that makes these riches available to a wider audience. Yet it does not have one; the only readily available complete English translation, the nineteenth-century product of R. T. H. Griffith, conceals rather than reveals the wonders of the R̥gveda and would (properly) discourage any sensitive reader from further pursuit of the text. Why this lacuna? The answer is quite simple: the R̥gveda is very long and very hard. Neither of these factors alone would necessarily hinder translation—both very long texts, like the Sanskrit epics, and very hard texts, like the Avestan Gāthās, are receiving their due—but the combination of the two has proved very daunting. We two translators, after some fifteen years of concentrated effort on the translation and more than forty years of living with and working with the text, can attest to the rigors of the task—but even more to its joys. And we feel privileged to have spent so much time in intimate contact with the poets who shaped such an extraordinary religious and liter ary achievement at the very dawn of the Indian tradition.
In the introduction that follows we try to give readers some grounding in the world and worldview of the R̥gveda and to provide enough information to approach the translation without undue bafflement. It is not meant as a comprehensive treatment of the many subjects touched on, but only a stepping stone to the text itself and the readers’ direct experience of the hymns.