Watson Kirkconnell

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

Kirkconnell was born in Port Hope, Ontario into a proudly Scottish-Canadian family descended from United Empire Loyalists and more recent immigrants from the British Isles. After his university studies were interrupted by the outbreak of World War I, Captain Watson Kirkconnell was extremely disappointed to be classified as medically unfit for active service when he was only days away from being shipped to the Western Front with the Canadian Corps. He instead spent the rest of the war guarding Central Powers POWs at Fort Henry and Kapuskasing internment camps in rural Ontario.

Following the 1918 Armistice, he entered a university faculty career and became an internationally known poet, translator of poetry, and literary critic. After learning enormously from what he taught about world literature to his students, Kirkconnell made radical teaching innovations and also became an enormously influential public intellectual, who publicized and denounced human rights abuses under Fascism, Nazism, and Stalinism.

For his many many translations of their national poetry and that by "New Canadian" poets who composed in immigrant languages, Kirkconnell remains very well known in Iceland, Poland, Hungary, the former Yugoslavia, and Ukraine. For his original poetry, verse dramas, and light operas, Kirkconnell drew upon both Canadian and world history and while skillfully emulating poets and playwrights from throughout World Literature. He was also a highly skilled satirist, as seen in his verse parodies of Robert Burns and, in "Rain on the Waste Land", of T.S. Eliot.

Due to his arguments against what he came to see as the excessive Anglocentrism of his country and its culture and his use of the tapestry and mosaic metaphors in favor of embracing a multiethnic and multilingual Canadian culture, Kirkconnell was credited by his friend, collaborator in translating Ukrainian literature and poetry, and university colleague C.H. Andrusyshen with almost singlehandedly ending widespread discrimination against Canadians of White ethnic (meaning non-White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) ancestry and cultural identity. He has accordingly been dubbed the father of multiculturalism in Canada.

He was also, paradoxically, very eccentric, a life-long conspiracy theorist, and believer in the pseudosciences of eugenics and scientific racism. Even more paradoxically, Kirkconnell was an anti-Semite as a young man and again as an old man, when he embraced Holocaust denial under the influence of conspiracy theorist William Guy Carr; but in the intervening period he regularly made and published literary translations of verse he admired by Jewish poets. Furthermore, while Kirkconnell was hesitant to condemn Nazism in May 1939, he changed his mind and used his many literary contacts to help mobilize Canadian immigrant communities in favour of the Allied war effort. Furthermore, in 1943 he eulogized the victims of the Holocaust in a poem entitled "Agony of Israel" and in 1962 he mocked both Soviet and Nazi ideology in a Greek tragedy-style stage play about the Exodus.

At the same time, similarly to American and Canadian veterans of the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War, who were often vilified for being "premature anti-Fascists" after returning home, Kirkconnell was similarly vilified, not only by Soviet journalists and politicians, but even by Canadian ones, for being a "premature anti-Stalinist". Even so, he continued to write and speak publicly about Soviet war crimes, religious persecution, the Holodomor, and other human rights abuses, and what he saw as the domestic threat posed by both the pro-Soviet Communist Party of Canada and the covert operations of the KGB and GRU on Canadian soil. During the Second World War, Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King seriously considered acting to protect Canada's military alliance with the USSR by silencing Kirkconnell with an order in council. Only after the 1945 defection of Soviet military intelligence officer Igor Gouzenko did the Canadian government and it's counterintelligence services begin taking Kirkconnell's claims seriously and decide to recruit him as a covert informant. Even so, Kirkconnell was also a very harsh critic of U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy, whom he accused of having discredited anti-communism by acting in, "an offensive and blundering fashion."

Even though Kirkconnell's pioneering vision for multiculturalism was intended to make his country less Anglocentric and more accepting only of Canadians who spoke immigrant languages and had ancestral roots in European nations other than Great Britain, the concept has been widened before and since his death to also acknowledge the cultural contributions of First Nation peoples and other non-Whites.

One of his most popular literary translations from Hungarian literature 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 besieged city by aeroplane for publication in Budapest, which Kirkconnell rendered into the same idiom as English war poets Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, and Isaac Rosenberg, remains just as popular.