Mārtiņš Laizāns

• Master of Arts
• Research Assistant at University of Latvia

The subject of this article is the phenomena of Western Antiquity and the problems regarding the translatability of them into Latvian language from literary works in modern languages – French, English, Spanish etc. (i.e., other than Ancient Greek or Latin). In the Latvian translations one can observe some typical occurences of translation and rendi...

In this article, a fragment from the novel “Mērnieku laiki” (‘The Times of the Land Surveyors’, 1879) by Reinis and Matīss Kaudzīte has been compared with its translations in several languages. The chosen fragment contentwise is saturated with elements of gastronomic cornucopia, and most of these and the accompanying phenomena of the imagined honor...

Visual poetry in Latvian literature is still an extraordinary phenomenon. In this case, by extraordinary is meant its scarce appearance among the corpus of Latvian literary texts – only very few examples of it exist in Latvian literature even in the 21st century, though it has gained a visible presence in other literatures of the world since at lea...

This paper explores the principal concepts of poetry composition apparent in the poetic works produced by Basilius Plinius, a 16 th-century physician and humanist from Riga. His corpus contains occasional poetry and panegyrical poetry, but the largest and the most important part of his oeuvre is his didactic poetry; more specifically, didactic work...

As already the title – beasts – of the poetry collection by Latvian poet Krišjānis Zeļģis (published in 2016) indicates, a focus on the imagery of animals is to be expected. Humans, animals, beasts and other living beings create a multilayered set of imagery. With the mediacy of animals, the relationship and attitudes between humans and their surro...

[straipsnis ir santrauka anglų kalba, santrauka lietuvių kalba] Salomonas Frenzelis, XVI a. humanistas, paskutinius savo gyvenimo metus praleidęs Rygoje, propemptikone De vera nobilitate vartoja įvairių mitologinių ir realių gyvūnų įvaizdžius. Šie įvaizdžiai pasitelkiami kalbant apie aukštuomenės išsilavinimą ir santykį tarp nobilitas generis ir n...

The paper "Nobilitas literaria in the Neo-latin literary works of Riga humanists" deals with the notion of nobility that is to be attained through the acquisition and exercise of liberal arts and sciences. This aspect of nobility is an essential phaenomenon in the thought of Renaissance humanists and a lot of treatises have been devoted to the disc...

Visual poetry in Latvian literature is an extraordinary phenomenon. In this case by extraordinay is meant its scarce appearance among the corpus of Latvian literary texts – only very few examples of it exist in Latvian literature even in the 21st century when it has gained a prominent place in other literatures of the world and there has been a tur...

The image of Hyperboreans describes the Northeast border of Europe that has historically been in a pendular state between the cultural values of the West, East, and local pagan ones. Early modern times were a crucial period in the shaping of regional identity features as at that particular time Livonian Order collapsed and Livonia was devastated by...

Neo-Latin literature of Baltic Region in the 16th century used classical mythology as a source to develop cultural self-awareness, thus positioning the identity of Livonian authors in the context of Western European cultural heritage and simultaneously representing Livonian culture of Riga as a unique opposition to the Old Europe. The texts of Riga...

This article titled “Scrolling for a happy life: observations from Antiquity for contemporary reader” deals with the subject of reading – the process of reading, the matter for reading and the goals of reading, all viewed from the perspective of an author of Antiquity – Lucius Annaeus Seneca. As Seneca has written a lot on the subject of reading an...

This article is dedicated to Johann Gotthelf Lindner, the rector of Riga Dome School, his time spent in Riga and the school dramas he wrote. The article consists of three parts – a brief outline of Lindner’s biography followed by a description of his work at Riga Dome School and the last part takes a look on his literary works. In the context of We...

The focus of this article is on the prolific and variegated translation possibilities of the substantivations of Ancient Greek in the text under translation into Latvian – Aristotle’s „Rhetoric”. The potential translations of Ancient Greek substantivations are examined from the viewpoint of conversion, elliptic substantivations and substantivated s...

This article describes a general overview of a particular approach of translating an Ancient Greek text into Latvian. The translators (of whom the authors of the article are a part) have devised a translational approach, which sets as its goal the elimination of unnecessary influences of historically predominant intermediary languages (e.g. German,...

The problem of rendering Ancient Greek proper names into Latvian is as old as the written Latvian language itself. Respectively, this problem has been studied on a wide scale, but still the new translations of ancient texts force to review the former and current renditions and reevaluate them. Historically a significant impact on the principles of...