The Rigveda is the oldest Indian and one of the oldest Indo-European texts. It is a collection of 1,028 hymns addressed to the gods, composed in highly poetic and notoriously difficult Archaic Sanskrit. Medieval Indian commentaries and especially the modern Western scholarship of the past 150 years have increasingly shed more light on its poetry, religion, and ritual as well as on its contemporary meaning. The Rigveda has been translated in scholarly fashion only once during the twentieth century, and that was into German in 1951 by K. F. Geldner and published in three separate volumes of Harvard Oriental Studies, numbers 33, 34, and 35. Renou's French and Elizarenkova's Russian translations closely follow Geldner's. Geldner's volumes have long been out of print; they are reprinted here in one useful reference volume.

卡爾•弗裏德裏希•蓋爾德納（1852-1929），德國籍世界知名東方學(印度伊朗學)傢。曾在柏林和馬堡大學任教授，主要緻力於東方古典文獻研究，如《阿維斯塔》和《梨俱吠陀》的闡釋。

著作：《雛形時期<阿維斯塔>的韻律學》(1877);《<阿維斯塔>研究》(1882); 《<阿維斯塔>:波斯人的聖書》(英語和德語),3捲本,(1885-1889);《<阿維斯塔>文學》,收錄於《伊朗文學概論》,Kuhn與蓋爾德納編;《七十<梨俱吠陀>英雄》,與Roth 及Kägi閤著(1875);《吠陀研究》,與Pischel閤著,3冊, (1885-1889);《<梨俱吠陀>選》, (1907);

《梨俱吠陀：由梵文譯成德文且附有一篇截選評論》(1923)