Editorial gestures in the Vedic texts.

In his translation of the Vedic Hymns, Max Mueller took the liberty to re-arrange the hymns as he thought was needful; the rationale that he cites for doing so is very interesting; the original Vedic writers themselves had done so – and therefore, it made sense for him to do so presently in the 19^th century. This process of editing is seen as normative textual behaviour; whereby the translator-editor has the freedom and intellectual judgement to decide how to arrange the hymns.

There is nothing absolute or divine to what we construe as “revealed knowledge” and we would be deluding ourselves if we forgot the human editorial element.

VEDIC HYMNS

PART I

HYMNS TO THE MARUTS, RUDRA, VÂYU, AND VÂTA

Translated by

F. MAX MÜLLER

Clarendon: Oxford University Press

[1891]

PREFACE

TO THE FIRST EDITION.

After these preliminary remarks I have to say a few words on the general plan of my translation.

I do not attempt as yet a translation of the whole of the Rig-veda, and I therefore considered myself at liberty to group the hymns according to the deities to which they are addressed. By this process, I believe, a great advantage is gained. We see at one glance all that has been said of a certain god, and we gain a more complete insight into his nature and character. Something of the same kind had been attempted by the original collectors of the ten books, for it can hardly be by accident that each of them begins with hymns addressed to Agni, and that these are followed by hymns addressed to Indra. The only exception to this rule is the eighth Mandala, for the ninth being devoted to one deity, to Soma, can hardly be accounted an exception. But if we take the Rig-veda as a whole, we find hymns, addressed to the same deities, not only scattered about in different books, but not even grouped together when they occur in one and the same book. Here, as we lose nothing by giving up the old arrangement, we are surely at liberty, for our own purposes, to put together such hymns as have a common object, and to place before the reader as much material as possible for an exhaustive study of each individual deity.