At the beginning of this academic year, Contemporary Literature Press is publishing the greatest, the most famous, and also the most widely used English-Romanian dictionary of the 20th Century. Its accuracy is absolutely amazing, in spite of the fact that it was compiled so long ago.

If you do not already have an English dictionary, use it. I did so all the time during the five years when I studied English in a department led by Petre Clinca. At that time, Leon Levițchi was not a professor yet: he was a teaching assistant dealing with the translation of technical texts.

If you look at it carefully, this dictionary is surprisingly up to date. It gives the perfect image of the Romanian language as it was spoken when King Carol I ruled Romania. Let nobody forget — young students and old teachers alike — that, as far as synonyms are concerned, this dictionary is far better than the one published by the communist Academy in the 1980’s.

Except for the undeniable differences in current spelling (Romanian spelling had changed far too much and far too often over the years), this dictionary is still the best of tools, whether those who use it are young or old. Young Romanians will find in it their language as it was used 125 years ago, considering that it must have taken its author at least ten years to compile it. They will be struck by the modernity of this language — by the essential modernity of the Romanian language at all times.

I hope it will be as useful to you as it was to myself at a time, more than half a century ago, when there was no other English dictionary in Romania. Let those who teach English today learn from Lolliot how a dictionary must be made.

Lolliot’s dictionary preserves Romanian exactly as it was spoken at the time James Joyce began and ended his books, all of them. When you need to solve a difficult problem encountered in Finnegans Wake, remember to use this dictionary compiled by a famous lexicographer, who also taught at the best three highschools in Bucharest.

7 October 2014

C. George Sandulescu