| Abstract [eng] |
Professor Jonas Dumčius’ archive, stored in the Manuscript Department of the Vilnius University Library is relevant to this day, both as a source of unpublished texts and as an object of scientific inquiry as well as fundamental material. By viewing Jonas Dumčius’ legacy as a whole, certain observations can be made regarding his scientific interests and translations at certain points in his personal life and academic career. During the first years of his mature academic career, after his work exchange in Basel, Dumčius felt he was participating in the scientific life of Europe and was sufficiently prepared for this, so he set his thoughts out in Latin, the language of science, understood by all of the world‘s philologists. He wrote several large scientific studies in Latin, one of which Dumčius intended to defend as his doctoral thesis. After the war, Dumčius focused on his translation work. Available documents lead to the conclusion that terminus post quem can be considered written in the year 1946. As is apparent from the study conducted in this article, the larger part of his translations were carried out up to 1960, though much of it was only published posthumously or remains in manuscript form. We can also conclude that Dumčius focused most of his attention on classical drama (both tragedy and comedy), translating entire bodies of Plautus’, Terence’s and Menander’s work and touching upon other dramatists (Aristophanes, Aeschylus, Sophocles and Seneca). Typically, Dumčius did not take on previously translated work, but chose to work on material that had never been translated. From 1958, Dumčius became a prolific academician, writing and publishing (with the help of his fellow co-authors) textbooks and educational tools, eventually settling his focus on writing academic articles towards the last decades of his life, from 1970, and maintaining his translation work throughout. In 1958, he successfully defended his doctoral thesis “On Classical Proper Names in the Lithuanian Language”, an unprecedented attempt in the broader European context to study the written tradition of classical names in Lithuania from the Renaissance to the twentieth century. With the exception of the Biblical names, the data collected in this dissertation was digitised and became the foundation for the Digital Database of Classical Proper Names, a project financed by the Research Council of Lithuania. |
