This work is concerned with Ṛgvedic poetics. Its author has been engaged in an on-going Ṛgveda translation project for some years and has to her credit a number of research papers dealing with Ṛgvedic grammar, syntax, morphology, ritual, imagery and myth, some of which include Avestan and Indo-European perspectives. At the outset, she makes a pertinent remark about the Ṛgveda, namely that it is “the last of its tradition in one sense and the first in another”, representing as it does the peak of Indo-European oral praise poetry known also from the Avesta, archaic odes of Greece and old Celtic bards, and starting the tradition of high-art poetry which eventually culminated in classical kāvya literature in medieval India. From this assessment of the Ṛgveda is derived the book's title. It contains four papers based on lectures delivered by the author at the Collège de France in 2004.

The first one, entitled ‘Poet: the Construction of a Poetic Persona and the Gāthās of Zarathustra’, concentrates, besides a few other, lesser issues, on the question of different treatment of the Ṛgvedic poets – supposed authors of the hymns – and the “towering figure of Zarathustra” who is credited with the authorship of the hymn cycle of the Avestan Gāthās (which are very important for the study of Ṛgvedic hymns – and vice versa). There are well over two hundred poets named as the authors of hymns in the Ṛg Veda, but scholarly investigation has treated its text mostly as an undifferentiated whole as if its arrangement into hymns and their authorship were irrelevant. The author calls this “de-emphasis on the poetic persona”. The reason is that not much is known about the background of Vedic poets and their reappearance in later narratives does not build on the hymns attributed to them; neither are these narratives back-projected into Ṛgvedic times by ancient or modern interpreters. How, then, has it come about that Zarathustra is viewed so distinctly as the author of the Gāthās and that an elaborate legendary biography was produced about him? By an extensive and involved argument the author shows that the “poetic persona” of the Gāthās “need not be assigned to any real personality, much less to the, or a, historical Zarathustra”. This “poetic persona” comes from “the first person speaker” of most gāthās, a feature which they share with other early Indo-European poetic traditions, but which is almost absent in the Ṛgveda. The poetic ‘I’ speaker of the Gāthās was only later equated with a distinct person referred to as Zarathustra who may not even have existed (since zarathustra was not a name, but a priestly title no doubt borne by many) and as such, i.e. as a distinct prophet of that name, was possibly a creation of later texts and became a subject of legendary embellishments. In contrast, there are no ‘prophets’ among the named poets of Ṛgvedic hymns.

In the second paper, ‘Poem: Structuring Devices in Ṛgvedic hymns’, the author assumes that all of them were composed for employment in rituals. While this was the main use to which they were put in the context of cult, many hymns, even if their eventual use in the ritual may also have been envisaged while they were being created, betray their origin in cosmogonic speculations, spiritual and philosophical quest, ecstatic experiences, poetic inspiration and some even in a worldly ambition to be included among the seers and thus raised in social status. Jan Gonda had already remarked that a part of the Ṛg Veda originated in all probability independently of the sacrificial ritual (Die Religionen Indiens I, 1960, p. 10). That the use of hymns (Skt. sukta, ‘well spoken’ [words]) in ritual was their secondary function is illustrated by the selective use of individual stanzas for recitation during sacrifices quite out of context. The author herself says that in ritual use “the integrity of the hymn, the sūkta, was not always respected”. But her main concern is to establish that the Ṛgvedic hymns represent a distinct poetic category; she wants “to seek principles of their internal unity” which she finds in formal linguistic and semantic devices – repetition in various configurations, symmetrical sets of boundary verses, some of which can be identified also in the Gāthās, and other overt or covert structuring traits. She expects to find structure in every poem even if it is not easy to discern.

The third paper, ‘Poetics: Vasiṣṭha's hymns to Varuṇa’, concentrates on four hymns (VII.86–89) which allow to some extent for their author to be constructed as a personality in a similar way as happened with the poet of the Gāthās so that some scholars have referred to Vasiṣṭha as an Indian Zarathustra, although he did not acquire similar prominence. The author sees in Vasiṣṭa's hymns devices whose roots can be traced to earlier, Indo-Iranian or even Indo-European, traditions. But she also detects in them elements pointing to the poetic style of medieval kāvya literature and offers examples to prove her point.

The last paper is called ‘Poetry: Kauui, Kavi, Kāvya’. Between the end of the composition of the Ṛgveda, which is dated before 1000 BC, and the first attested kāvya style poems there elapsed at least 500 years. What happened in the meantime? Poets could no longer insert their creation into the codified sacred scripture, but poetic creativity would hardly abruptly disappear, it only may have changed its objective. Instead of praising and glorifying gods, it turned to human subjects. The author is convinced that praise poetry directed to powerful royal patrons in fact coexisted with Vedic praise poetry addressed to gods and continued to be created also in the subsequent centuries, although it went unrecorded (but there are Iranian and Indo-European examples). She sees the first recorded example of it in India in a Sanskrit inscription dated to c. AD 150. After a discussion of the Iranian context of kauui and Indian kavi with its derivative kāvya, the author finds the earliest evidence for kāvya style poetry in the Buddhist Pāli Canon in the Thera/Therī Gāthās (verses of monks and nuns) before it appeared in its lyrical form in the classical time. In fact, a similar case can be made for Vedic praise poetry directed to gods as continuing after the codification of the Ṛg Veda and going unrecorded until it emerged within the medieval bhakti movement in the form of devotional songs.

By its nature this book, which addresses an erudite readership with scholarly background, defies a comprehensive review so that only a patchy picture of it could be given here. It abounds in detailed analyses and also brings ideas and material to illuminate many secondary topics, some of them useful also for historians of religion.