Kellens, Jean. 2026. Les Gâthâs attribuées à Zarathuštra. Aux origines de l’Avesta et de la religion zoroastrienne. Paris: Les Belles Lettres.
At the source of the Avesta, the collection of the oldest sacrificial recitations of the Zoroastrian religion, one finds a small corpus of poems, the Gāthās—“songs” composed in a particularly archaic language. These venerable chants are regarded by the faithful as the very work of the founding prophet, Zarathustra, and this act of faith is largely endorsed by many representatives of contemporary scholarship. These are difficult texts, with complex grammar and sophisticated rhetoric, which have inspired many learned interpretations but only rare attempts at popularization, often driven by the desire to turn them into distant mirrors in which our own image is reflected. The translation offered in this volume, and the clarifications that accompany it, aim to make this corpus readable while preserving the originality of a voice that comes from the depths of time and is not addressed to us.
The translator, Jean Kellens, is a leading scholar in Avestan studies. Professor emeritus at the Collège de France, he held the Chair of Indo-Iranian Languages and Religions from 1993 to 2014. In his work, he seeks to shed light, through comparison, on the earliest literatures of India and Iran.
