Last Translations; Russian Poems by Eugene M. Kayden (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 72ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW Krutch, but could not go to England because of World War I. In 1924 he founded the Economics Department at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, and he taught there until his retirement in 1955. Kayden's life-long avocation of translating Russian poetry and short stories found a frequent avenue of publications in the Coiorado Quarterly. It is, therefore, by bequest that these "Last Translations" are published there after his death in 1977. As a translator of verse, Kayden was uncompromising. Just writing an "equivalent" poem was not enough. An accurate rendition of the meaning was not enough. The form of the original had to be rendered as well, the meter, the rhyme scheme, and even the sound texture, if possible. The efforts here show this uncompromising attitude toward poetic translation, though some are more successfully done than others. Clearly superb are the translations here of Simonov's "Wait for Me" and the prologue to Nekrasov's longer "Who Lives Well in Russia." In several cases, it is interesting to compare Kayden's translations to the verse translations of others. His version of Gippius' "Electricity," for example, is less accurate semantically than the version in the anthology of Markov and Sparks (Modern Russian Poetry, Bobbs-Merrill Co., New York, 1967), but the form is equally preserved and the total effect is as pleasing. There is no better version of Ryleev's difficult "Citizen," but Lauren Leighton's translation of Davydov's "Song of an Old Hussar" (Russian Literature Triquarterly , No. 3, Spring 1972, pp. 55) seems more true than the one here...