Watson Kirkconnell

Watson Kirkconnell
Born(1895-05-16)16 May 1895
Port Hope, Ontario, Canada
Died26 February 1977(1977-02-26) (aged 81)
Wolfville, Nova Scotia, Canada
AwardsOrder of Canada

Watson Kirkconnell, OC FRSC (16 May 1895 – 26 February 1977) was a Canadian literary scholar, poet, playwright, linguist, satirist, and translator.

Kirkconnell became a nationally known and enormously influential public intellectual, who publicized and denounced human rights abuses under Fascism, Nazism, and Stalinism.[1] He was also, paradoxically, a life-long adherent to varying degrees of scientific racism. Even more paradoxically, with the exception of his early adulthood, while Kirkconnell was an anti-Semite as a young man and again as an old man, in the intervening period he regularly made and published literary translations of verse he admired by Jewish poets[2][3] and, while hesitant to condemn Nazism in 1939, by 1943 would eulogize the victims of the Holocaust in a poem entitled "Agony of Israel".[4]

At the same time, due to his arguments against what he came to see as the excessive Anglocentrism of his country and its culture[5][6] and his use of a tapestry metaphor in favor of embracing an all-European, multiethnic and multilingual Canadian culture, Kirkconnell has been credited by his Ukrainian Canadian friend and colleague C.H. Andrusyshen with almost singlehandedly ending social discrimination against Canadians of White ethnic (meaning non-British) ancestry.[7] He has accordingly been dubbed the father of multiculturalism in Canada by his successor at Acadia University, J.R.C. Perkin.[8]

For his original poetry, verse dramas, and light operas, Kirkconnell drew upon both Canadian and world history and also emulated other poets and playwrights from throughout World Literature. He was also a highly skilled satirist, as may be seen in his verse parodies of Robert Burns[9] and, in his poem "Rain on the Waste Land", of T.S. Eliot.[10]

For his many many translations of their national poetry and by White Ethnic Canadian poets who composed in immigrant languages, Kirkconnell remains very well known in Iceland, Eastern and Central Europe.[11][12] One of his most popular translations is of János Arany's The Bards of Wales, an 1864 ballad criticizing the conquest of Wales by King Edward Longshanks, but which was intended as a covert denunciation of Emperor Franz Joseph over the defeat of the Hungarian revolution of 1848, and which Kirkconnell translated into the same idiom as the Child ballads. Furthermore, Watson Kirkconnell's 1933 translation of World War I soldier-poet Géza Gyóni's iconic anti-war poem, Csak egy éjszakára ("For Just One Night"), which was composed during the Siege of Przemyśl in 1915 and flown out of the city by aeroplane for publication in Budapest,[13] which Kirkconnell rendered into the same idiom as English war poets Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, and Isaac Rosenberg,[14] remains just as popular.[15][16]

  1. ^ Watson Kirkconnell's Covert War against Communism, By Gordon L. Heath, Canadian Baptist Historical Society, August 15, 2019.
  2. ^ Meister, Daniel R (2021). The Racial Mosaic: A Pre-History of Canadian Multiculturalism. McGill-Queen's University Press.
  3. ^ Meister, Daniel R (2020). "" 'Anglo-Canadian Futurities': Watson Kirkconnell, scientific racism, and cultural pluralism in interwar Canada"". Settler Colonial Studies. 10 (2): 234–56. doi:10.1080/2201473X.2020.1726148. S2CID 213470837.
  4. ^ Watson Kirkconnell (1966), Centennial Tales and Selected Poems, University of Toronto Press, for Acadia University. Pages 144-147.
  5. ^ Watson Kirkconnell's Covert War against Communism, By Gordon L. Heath, Canadian Baptist Historical Society, August 15, 2019.
  6. ^ Meister, Daniel (16 December 2013). "Watson Kirkconnell". The Canadian Encyclopedia (online ed.). Historica Canada.
  7. ^ Edited by J.R.C. Perkin (1975), The Undoing of Babel: Watson Kirkconnell - The Man and His Work, Acadia University. Pages 31-49.
  8. ^ Edited by J.R.C. Perkin (1975), The Undoing of Babel: Watson Kirkconnell - The Man and His Work, Acadia University. Pages 7-16.
  9. ^ Watson Kirkconnell (1966), Centennial Tales and Selected Poems, University of Toronto Press, for Acadia University. Pages 151-156.
  10. ^ Watson Kirkconnell (1966), Centennial Tales and Selected Poems, University of Toronto Press, for Acadia University. Pages 135-136.
  11. ^ Meister, Daniel (16 December 2013). "Watson Kirkconnell". The Canadian Encyclopedia (online ed.). Historica Canada.
  12. ^ Woodsworth, Judith (April 2000). "Watson Kirkconnell and the "Undoing of Babel": a Little-Known Case in Canadian Translation History" (PDF). Meta. 45 (1): 13–28. doi:10.7202/004618ar – via Érudit.
  13. ^ Erika Papp Faber (2012), A Sampler of Hungarian Poetry, Romanika Kiadó, Budapest. p. 120.
  14. ^ Watson Kirkconnell (1933), The Magyar Muse: An Anthology of Hungarian Poetry, 1400-1932, Foreword by Mr. Francis Herczeg, Winnipeg. Pages 184-185.
  15. ^ Tim Cross (1988), The Lost Voices of World War I, pp. 349–350.
  16. ^ Géza Gyóni, translated by Watson Kirkconnell, "For Just One Night", St Austin Review, March/April 2014, World War One: Hell, Heroism, and Holiness, page 18.