The Ekelöf Research Dictionary for English

“The objectives of this work are (1) to analyze the poetic works of Gunnar Ekelöf by searching for patterns in the distribution of lexemes and allolexes within the corpus and (2) to create valuable tools to spur, inspire, and assist in future reading and research into Ekelöf’s poetry. In the former goal, the degree of my success will be determined by my peers. In the latter goal, I am certain I have been successful. Any time a researcher or casual reader would like to know the English translation of any Swedish, Latin, French, Greek, German, or Arabic word that Ekelöf uses, my concordance provides. I have taken great pains to collapse all wordforms into words, without destroying information, making this tome that much easier to reference for this utility. This concordance offers 8,556 entries of Swedish, 407 entries of Latin, 286 entries of French, 138 entries of Greek alphabetic text (which has both Greek and Latin words), 53 entries of quoted Swedish, 50 entries of English, 37 entries of Italian, 29 entries of German, 23 entries of Greek, 15 entries of Arabic, 5 entries of Hindi, and 3 entries of Turkish. Any time a researcher or casual reader would like to know whether Ekelöf uses a word, how many times he does so, and where, my concordance provides. Each entry includes a count of the number of times the word is used, a count of the number of times each wordform is used, and an index to every usage in every book, usually by poem but sometimes by section in the case of the longer, less easily subdivided works. This utility will allow researchers to easily find every usage of a word to more closely analyze its context and has allowed me to determine the most frequently used words in every book and language, both overall and by individual syntactic categories. Any time a researcher or casual reader would like to know what Ekelöf scholars have to say about a particular word or wordform, my concordance provides. For many entries, though indeed not all, I have written one to a few sentences of elaborating information, and in these sentences, I provide a synopsis of other researchers’ and translators’ commentary in other scholarly publications. I have scoured this literature for the ideas, findings, and conclusions the Ekelöf scholars have shared on particular words, wordforms, and phrases and summarized and cited them here. In this way, I have, I believe, elevated this work from a mere concordance to a research dictionary. In these many utilities, I believe my concordance provides much to readers and students seeking greater understanding of the works, to researchers seeking and forging paths to new research, and even to translators looking for a different way to approach the text. Before moving onto the concordance itself, I will describe the methodology used to create it.”