Contemporary Literature Press, under The University of Bucharest, in conjunction with The British Council, The Romanian Cultural Institute, and The Writers’ Union of Romania, The National Museum of Romanian Literature announces the publication of two books: Vocabulary Richness in English Poetry: The Lambda Indicator and Beyond, wrote by Andrew Wilson & Ioan-Iovitz Popescu, and, What’s left of life, wrote by Robert Șerban. The last one is translated into English by Lidia Vianu andanf it is edited by Lidia Vianu.
Vocabulary Richness in English Poetry: The Lambda Indicator and Beyond
The purpose of this booklet is to help define a simple quantitative measure for the vocabulary richness of homogeneous texts. In addition, this measure must also have a variance in order to be used to compare texts with each other. A large set of 1,140 different poems, written in English by 177 poets over a period of time from Shakespeare’s time to the present, has been collected from a number of Internet sources. The poems included in the sample ranged in length (N) from 41 words to 4,961 words. It was found that the well-known Lambda indicator has a certain dependence on the length of the text, although the slope of the model line is very small. The new W indicator (from Wilson), also based on ARC length of the text (L), behaves even better, seeming to have virtually no dependence on N.
Each poem was analysed separately using AQLA (Altmann Quantitative Linguistics Analyser), a new online tool that is able to calculate a series of textual statistics. Currently, the program is able to process texts in English or Romanian, but its extension in other languages is not a problem.Lidia Vianu
Andrew Wilson & Ioan-Iovitz Popescu. Vocabulary Richness in English Poetry: The Lambda Indicator and Beyond, is formally launched on 30 July 2022, but it is available for consultation and downloading on receipt of this Press Release, at the following internet address.
What’s left of life
Robert Șerban (b. 1970) is well-known in Romania as writer, journalist and editor. He lives in Timișoara [the European Capital of Culture 2023]. He is very much present in Romanian literary life, hosting a TV show, editing a magazine, and organizing festivals of literature in his town. He has published twenty books so far, has been granted many prizes, has been translated in some 30 countries and into as many languages.
I first read him when I translated into English a poetry anthology of the Romanian Writers’ Union. He stood out by his direct simplicity and depth of emotion. He is a shy poet who loves silence more than words. The shorter the poem, the more intense it is.
Robert’s poems are very much about the time and place he lives in: he is not a novelist, and yet his books tell many stories and explain Romania to those who have never seen it.
Robert Șerban. What’s left of life, translated into English by Lidia Vianu and Anne Stewart, edited by Lidia Vianu, is formally launched on 29 July 2022, but it is available for consultation and downloading on receipt of this Press Release, at the following internet address.