What follows is my translation of a late Ṛgvedic hymn (~1000BCE) which has ever since its composition provided much material for interpretation. It has been translated into many languages since the early days of Indology and is not uncommonly featured in discussions of Indo-European religion and culture. This is not unnatural as some early stanzas of the Old Norse Völuspá seem to offer striking parallels though it should be noted that there are also important differences too.

In any case, the interest aroused in the hymn seems to be mostly as it was, and often is, believed to offer an early agnostic-ish view. I don’t think this is true. It is a cosmogenic riddle and the fits exactly into the cosmogony provided in later sources. The answer of the riddle posed in the very first stanza and sustained throughout is probably, as in later sources, mind which is something that both exists and does not. Joel Brereton has a great paper where he goes over all the stanzas line by line and show how they fit this interpretation. I would encourage interested readers to read it. You can read the original text here.

X.129

Translation

There was neither non-existent nor existent then:
there was neither darkness nor the further heaven,
What moved? Where? In whose protection?
Was there actually water, deep and profound?

There was neither death nor immortality then,
neither night nor day had their appearance.
That ONE breathed breathlessly with its power;
except for it there was nothing further at all.

Darkness was at first engulfed by darkness;
all this was undifferentiated surging waters.
When it was formless and covered by the void,
from the power of heat was the ONE born.

It was desire that arose in the beginning,
which was the first seed of mind. Relation 
of the existent in the non-existent did the wise
with wisdom found out, searching in their hearts.

Their cord stretched transversely,
was it below or was it actually above?
There were seed-bearers, the great ones,
ethos was down below, offering further away.

Who knows for sure? Who will proclaim it here?
Whence was it born? Whence is this creation?
After the creation were the gods themselves,
who then knows from where it arose?

From where did this creation arose,
did he place it or did he not place it?
He who supervises it from the highest 
heaven, surely, he knows. Or does he?

Some Comments on Translation

1. ‘Darkness’ here translates ‘rájas’. In a later verse, another word ‘támas’ is also translated as ‘darkness’. These two words do the signify the same exact thing and have different shades of meaning which, however, I couldn’t preserve in the translation. ‘Abyss’ might also have been a suitable word here instead of ‘profound’. The presence of deep waters as the substrate of further creation is a common point both in Indic and in Semitic traditions.

2. ‘neither death nor immortality’. Or to be a little more literal, ‘neither death nor non-deathness’. In Vedic, and in many IE languages generally, the idea of immortality is literally un-death. So, words from same root are compared here that I couldn’t preserve in translation The word used for death in the original is cognate with English ‘murder’. The distinction is also somewhat visible even in English, though through Latin derived words, as in ‘mortal’ and ‘immortal’ from ‘mortalis’ and ‘immortalis’. The use of ‘that’ before ‘ONE’ is to reflect the neuter in the original. ‘breathed breathlessly’ where the second word is translated so to match the first while ‘without wind’ might have been a more literal choice. I take ‘avātáṁ’ in the adverbial sense.

3. ‘surging waters’ The original has only ‘saliláṁ’ which means ‘surging’ or ‘flowing’ but comes to mean ‘river’ in the later language. Two words which mean almost the same thing are used here. I’ve translated one as ‘formless’ and the other as ‘void’ but both mean, generally speaking, ‘empty’. ‘tápas’ in the early times mean straightforwardly ‘heat’ or ‘warmth’ and not ‘austerities’ as it later comes to mean.

4. ‘Desire’ translates ‘kā́ma’ here, the same word as in ‘kāmasūtra’. The word for ‘seed’ means here, and in later verses, the literal masculine seed or semen. The ‘wise’ translates ‘kaví’ which generally means ‘poet’ in the later language and it here too refers to the seers who compose hymns like these. ‘bándhu’ means literally ‘kin’ and is cognate to English ‘bond’ (as in bond of friendship). It later texts it is a technical term that may best be rendered as ‘analogue’ for example, the sun is the bándhu of the fire inasmuch as the sun is the heavenly fire and fire the terrestrial sun.

5. ‘transversely’ translates ‘tiraścī́no’ where ‘trans’ and ‘tiras’ are cognates. ‘raśmí’, which is translated as ‘cord’ here, usually means ‘ray of the sun’ in the later language. ‘svadhā́’ has elsewhere been translated as ‘own power’ but that seems a bit awkward here. ‘ethos’ is the exact etymological cognate to the word.

6. ‘addhā́’ for emphasis. The whole of this verse is both in its structure and in its vocabulary characteristic of the riddle. The answer, which I indicated at the beginning, is given in the verse 4 though it is often not recognized as such by many readers, especially those who read in translation.

7. ‘ádhyakṣa’ literally means ‘over-eye’ i.e. someone who observes a thing directly. I have used ‘supervise’ as a similar enough word, especially as that is what means in the later language as well as in my own mother tongue. ‘ Or does he?’ might more accurately “or he does not know.”