He studied Latvian philology at the University of Latvia and published his first collection of poetry in 1980.

In 2009, Bērziņš finished the translation of Quran into Latvian, an enormous work that took him fifteen years.

He remembered with fondness the half year he spent working in an Istanbul library.

In 2009 and again in 2010, he was named one of the World's 500 most influential Muslims in survey conducted by the Royal Islamic Strategic Studies Center[4] (though Bērziņš was actually Lutheran).

Bērziņš translated from Polish, Russian, Old Icelandic, Turkish, Azerbaijani, Turkmen, Persian, Ancient Hebrew and Arabic; he also knew Ivrit (Modern Hebrew), Tatar and Chuvash.