Foreign Versions of English Names and Foreign Equivalents of United States Military and Civilian Titles (review)

BOOK REVIEWS71 Foreign Versions of English Names and Foreign Equivalents of United States Military and Civilian Titles. Detroit, Mich.: Grand River Books, 1973. 227 p. This is a quick reference guide, originally compiled by the United States Department of Justice, Immigration and Naturalization Service, document M-131, Rev. 1973, as an index to foreign equivalents of commonly-used English given names. Sixteen language groups, representing twenty-fournationalities or language sources, are represented: Bulgarian , Czech and Slovak, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Estonian, Finnish, Italian, Latvian and Lithuanian, Polish, Portuguese, Rumanian, Russian, Serbian, Croatian and Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish and Norwegian , Ukrainian, and Yiddish, to which 1,800 English names are indexed with their foreign equivalents. An appendix lists fifty-seven diplomatic and military titles, twenty-nine professional designations, and five "courtesy styles" (citizen, comrade, miss, mister, and mrs.). The virtue of this work is obviously utilitarian, not scholarly: neither derivations nor pronunciations nor accents are indicated (in German names, umlauts are sometimes observed, sometimes ignored: e.g., under John are the forms hanschen and Haenslein), and cross-references are frequently lacking (cf. Maria and Mary, each with largely duplicated listings , and not always in' correct alphabetical sequence). It nevertheless provides a very handy list for anyone wishing to know the foreign equivalents of an English given-name, or perhaps the English equivalent of a name encountered in a foreign work (but, since the listings are alphabetical by English version, one would have a difficult time finding many names that do not resemble their English equivalents: for instance, unless one had some knowledge of onomatology or genealogy, to trace Zosia to Sophia or Demetrios to James would be almost impossible). Errata include the consistent misspelling of Ukrainian (i.e., Ukranian) in the preface and throughout the text, and a rather unnatural employment of c in so-called Greek equivalents, where one would expect k, to represent kappa, the only letter in the Greek alphabet for the voiceless dorso-velar stop. CONRAD M. ROTHRAUFF, The State University College at Potsdam, New York Eugene M. Kayden, trans. Last Translations; Russian Poems. Boulder: Coiorado Quarterly Bonus Issue, February 1979. 73 p. We are informed on the book jacket and in the Introduction by editor Walter G. Simon that Eugene M. Kayden came to the U.S.A. from Russia in 1903 penniless and with no knowledge ofEnglish. By 1912 he had worked his way through the University of Colorado and was graduated with honors. He went on to attend Harvard, Princeton, and Columbia, and won a scholarship to Oxford over his classmates Mark Van Doren and Joseph Wood ...