In its 2010 first edition, The Muslim 500: The World’s 500 Most Influential Muslims, a popular reference book that is published by annually by the Jordan based Royal Islamic Strategic Studies Centre, included an entry for the Latvian scholar Uldis Bērziņš (1944–2021). Bērziņš’ entry mentions that ‘he is known for spending fifteen years on the first translation of the Qur’an in Latvian, published in 2009’, one of the earliest references to a Qur’an translation into Baltic languages aimed at an English-speaking readership. Bērziņš’ translation may be the first to be published, but, in fact there are actually two other translations of the Qur’an into Latvian: a partial translation produced by the Ahmadiyya community (most likely from the English translation published in Tilford, UK, in 1991), and a more recent, complete translation by Imants Kalniņš, which came out in 2011. This is noteworthy, given that there are only around 1.5 million native speakers of Latvian in Latvia itself, and about 120,000 living abroad. However, The Muslim 500 is incorrect in stating that Bērziņš’ translation came out in 2009: it was actually first published in 2007 by the Zvaigzne ABC press in Riga. Uldis Bērziņš may stand out as the first scholar to translate the Qur’an into Latvian, but how did this work does become so popular as to be globally noted in The Muslim 500?
Uldis Bērziņš graduated from Leningrad State University (now Saint Petersburg State University) with a diploma in Translation Studies. His background in Oriental Studies and interest in literary work led him to begin writing his own poetry, and to translate poetry from Azerbaijanian, Turkmen, Tatar, and other languages. According to some interviews, he was skilled in around twenty languages, at least in terms of reading and understanding them. He was also known for being a member of a translation team that worked on a new Latvian translation of the Bible, and as a political activist (as a member of the Latvian Social Democratic Working Party, the LSDSP). Later in his career, he moved to Sweden where he taught at Lund University. His Qur’an translation was not a solo effort: he had a collaborator on the project, Janis Esots (1966–2011), a renewed Latvian scholar of Persian philosophy. Following the publication of the first edition of the translation in 2009, a second edition (with some changes and corrections) came out in 2011, this time from Neputns publishing house, also based in Riga.
Uldis Bērziņš claimed in many interviews that his translation was based in the Arabic text, despite the fact that Arabic was never his main area of interest. He insisted on focusing on the literary character of the Qur’an, rather than merely concentrating on its legal and theological aspects, which is only to be expected given his background as an established poet and writer. Despite the fact that he himself was not a Muslim (he identified as being Lutheran), Bērziņš positioned his work as a kind of introduction of an important Oriental sacred text to the Latvian reader. This was actually a common trend in the post-Soviet space of the 1990s and 2000s. Against a background of a rise of interest in national cultures, combined with the paucity of popular religious literature that was a result of Soviet atheist politics, and the concomitant lack of Latvian translations of religious sources, there was a strong demand for new translations of a wide variety of religious texts, not least to challenge the primacy and narratives of existing texts written in imperial languages such as Russian. In interviews, Uldis Bērziņš mostly focused on the literary and popular features of his work, which he promoted as a source for understanding the Islamic East. His approach can be seen, for example, in his comment that:
‘I started timidly, and then became more and more involved. The volume of work is enormous and the charm of the Text is enormous. This is not a paraphrase on a topic, not a scientific study with links and question marks … I tried to convey the style of the Qur’an, to imitate Arabic syntax, Arabic logic (but God forbid from dry imitation that does not live and breathe in the target language!)’.
When looking at the actual text of the translation, it appears to have quite a deep level of engagement with the original Arabic: some words and phrases that occur repeatedly in the Qur’an are translated differently in different contexts, with a meaning that reflects the connotation of the source text. For example, the phrase dhālika l-kitābu lā rayba fīhā hūdan lil-muttaqīna in Q. 2:2 is translated as both the ‘unquestioned book’ (‘Šī – Grāmata, kas nav apšaubāma’) and as the book whose status as a ‘guide’ (ceļvede) cannot be challenged (Šī – Grāmata, kas nav apšaubāma). In addition, there are some references to the Islamic exegetical tradition, and Bērziņš states that he consulted some scholars from Turkey and Saudi Arabia, but these references are mostly of a general nature, using non-specific phrases such as ‘commentators say …’. When it comes to religious vocabulary, Latvian does not have an established style of ‘Islamic’ terminology yet, given the very small number of Muslims in the country (around 1,000 to 3,000), so Uldis Bērziņš used local cultural words: for example he translates imām as priekšstāvis (‘representative’).
Published only twice, the work is still available in Latvia; it is also frequently cited by local Islamic (or more generally, Religious) Studies scholars when quoting the Qur’an. This work is undeniably an important step in modern Qur’an translations in the post-Soviet space, and provides an example of a kind of interconnection between the rise of local nationalism and intercultural involvement, even in a country with such a small Muslim population.
Mykhaylo Yakubovych