Watson Kirkconnell

Watson Kirkconnell, (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. He was also, paradoxically, a life-long adherent to varying degrees of scientific racism. Even more paradoxically, with the exception of his early adulthood, Kirkconnell has also been alleged to have been a life-long adherent of varying degrees of anti-Semitism, who regularly made and published literary translations of verse he admired by Jewish poets and who, "out of life-long sympathy for the Jewish people", eulogized the victims of the Holocaust in his 1943 poem ''"Agony of Israel"''.

At the same time, due to his arguments against what he came to see as the excessive Anglocentrism of his country and its culture and his use of a tapestry metaphor in favor of embracing a 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. He has accordingly been dubbed the father of multiculturalism in Canada by his successor at Acadia University, J.R.C. Perkin.

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 and, in his poem ''"Rain on the Waste Land"'', of T.S. Eliot.

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. One of his most popular translations is of János Arany's ''The Bards of Wales'', an 1864 ballad covertly denouncing Emperor Franz Joseph for 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, which was composed and flown out by aeroplane for publication in Budapest during the Siege of Przemyśl in 1915, ''Csak egy éjszakára'' ("For Just One Night"), in which he renders Gyóni's poem into the same idiom as English war poets Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, and Isaac Rosenberg, remains just as popular. Provided by Wikipedia