There is an experience that comes to everyone who approaches the Rig Veda seriously after reading the classical Western translations: a slight unease, a persistent feeling that something is missing, that the text before them is poorer, flatter, more univocal than what the hymns seem to promise. This unease has a precise cause. Vedic Sanskrit is one of the most complex and richest languages humanity has ever produced, and translating it into any modern language inevitably impoverishes what is being translated. Not because translators lack talent, but because the very nature of Vedic Sanskrit resists translation through mechanisms that are specific to it and that no Western language possesses.
The first of these mechanisms is systematic polysemy. In English, French or German, a word generally has one main meaning and a few derived ones. In Vedic Sanskrit, a single word can simultaneously carry a dozen perfectly legitimate meanings, and the rishis exploited this multiplicity in a deliberate and sophisticated way. Take the word go, which appears hundreds of times in the Rig Veda. Go means cow, but also ray of light, speech, sky, earth and water. When a hymn asks Indra to conquer the go, it speaks simultaneously of the concrete cattle the sacrificer would like to possess and of the spiritual Light the practitioner seeks to reach. These two readings do not exclude each other. They coexist in the same word, in the same verse, in the same hymn. This is what I call the double reading of the Rig Veda, and it is a fundamental characteristic of the text that most Western translators have either ignored or underestimated.
In the same way, the word ashva, the horse, designates the animal but also vital force, spiritual energy, the power that allows consciousness to move forward. Artha means material wealth, goal, meaning, significance. Rta, generally translated as cosmic order or truth, designates at once the ordered movement of the stars, moral law, the rite correctly performed, and ultimate reality. A single word for four concepts that English can only express in four distinct terms, losing in the process the deep connection that Sanskrit maintains between these dimensions.
This polysemy is not a defect of Vedic Sanskrit. It is its strength. It reflects a vision of the world in which the concrete and the spiritual, the material and the cosmic, are not separated but are aspects of a single reality. When a language has a single word to designate both the cow and the divine light, it is because the civilisation that created that language saw no watertight boundary between these two realities. Language is always the reflection of the worldview of those who speak it, and Vedic Sanskrit is the reflection of a vision in which everything is connected, in which the sacrifice of the concrete cow and the search for spiritual light are part of the same movement.
The second mechanism is that of roots. Sanskrit is a root-based language, meaning that most words are constructed from a verbal root to which prefixes and suffixes are added according to precise rules. This system allows for an etymological transparency that modern languages have largely lost. In Vedic Sanskrit, one can often understand the deep meaning of a word simply by knowing its root, because the significance of the root is still alive in the derived word. Varuna comes from the root vri, meaning to surround, cover, contain. Understanding this root is to understand something essential about what Varuna is: not a sky god in any vague sense, but the force that surrounds and contains the universe, the cosmic ocean in which everything is immersed. Indra comes from a root meaning power, force. Agni comes from a root meaning to burn, the same root that gave Latin ignis, and from which English gets ignite and ignition. These connections are not anecdotal. They reveal the structure of Vedic thought.
The third mechanism is the grammar itself. Vedic Sanskrit has eight nominal cases, compared to six in Latin and two in modern English. It has three numbers: singular, plural, and dual — that intermediate number used to designate natural pairs, the two eyes, the two hands, the two Ashvins. It has three grammatical genders, masculine, feminine and neuter, used with a precision that often carries philosophical weight: Brahman in the neuter designates the impersonal Absolute, while Brahma in the masculine designates the creator god who would later appear in the Trimurti. This distinction, invisible in English which does not deploy grammatical gender in the same way, is fundamental for understanding Vedic thought. Sanskrit also possesses a verbal system of exceptional richness, with forms that express nuances of time, aspect, mood and intention that modern languages can only render at the cost of lengthy circumlocutions.
The fourth mechanism is sound itself. Vedic Sanskrit is a language in which phonetics carries cosmological importance. The rishis did not think that words were arbitrary conventions designating realities external to them. They believed that the sounds of Sanskrit were in direct resonance with the forces of the universe they designated. This is why the oral transmission of the Rig Veda was of absolute precision for millennia: to change a sound was to change the thing itself. Vedic grammarians developed a phonetic science, the Shiksha, of remarkable sophistication, long before modern linguistics began to concern itself with phonology. They had classified all the sounds of Sanskrit according to their place of articulation in the mouth and throat, according to their duration, pitch and accent, with a precision that contemporary phonologists can only admire.
The metre of the Rig Veda is another dimension of this richness. The hymns are not written in prose. They are composed in precise metres, the principal ones being the Gayatri, the Anushtubh, the Trishtubh and the Jagati, each with a defined number of syllables and a specific accentual pattern. These metres are not mere poetic ornaments. They have a precise spiritual and ritual function. Certain metres are associated with certain gods, certain functions, certain moments of the sacrifice. The Gayatri, the shortest and most sacred metre, gives its name to hymn 3.62.10, which is still today one of the most recited mantras in the Hindu world. A translator who renders a hymn in prose loses not only the music of the text, but an entire dimension of its meaning.
What all of this implies for translation is considerable. To translate the Rig Veda is necessarily to choose. To choose which of the multiple meanings of a word to retain, whether to privilege the literal or the spiritual reading, how to render a grammatical structure that has no equivalent in the target language. Every choice is a loss. This is why every translation of the Rig Veda is also, inevitably, an interpretation. And this is why translations differ so profoundly from one another — not because some translators are wrong and others right, but because each has made different choices when faced with the same inexhaustible richness.
The only honest way to approach the Rig Veda is therefore to keep this richness in mind at all times, never to forget that behind every word of the translation lies a Sanskrit word that probably contained ten times as much, and to accept that the text one is reading, however good the translation, is an approximation of a linguistic and spiritual reality that only the original language can fully contain. This is a limitation, but it is also an invitation: to approach the text with humility, curiosity, and the awareness that what one understands is never more than the beginning of what there is to understand.
Le Rig Veda 
Laisser un commentaire