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 i