Watson Kirkconnell (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 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 significant teaching innovations and also became an influential public intellectual, who publicized and denounced human rights abuses under Fascism, Nazism, and Stalinism.Watson Kirkconnell's Covert War against Communism, By Gordon L. Heath, Canadian Baptist Historical Society, August 15, 2019.
For his translations of their national poetry and "New Canadian" poets who composed in immigrant languages, Kirkconnell remains 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 emulating poets and playwrights from throughout World Literature. He was also a highly skilled satirist, as seen in his verse parodies of Robert BurnsWatson Kirkconnell (1966), Centennial Tales and Selected Poems, University of Toronto Press, for Acadia University. Pages 151-156. and, in "Rain on the Waste Land", of T.S. Eliot.Watson Kirkconnell (1966), Centennial Tales and Selected Poems, University of Toronto Press, for Acadia University. Pages 135-136.
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.Edited by J.R.C. Perkin (1975), The Undoing of Babel: Watson Kirkconnell - The Man and His Work, Acadia University. Pages 31-49. He has accordingly been dubbed the father of multiculturalism in Canada.Edited by J.R.C. Perkin (1975), The Undoing of Babel: Watson Kirkconnell - The Man and His Work, Acadia University. Pages 7-16.
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"Watson Kirkconnell (1966), Centennial Tales and Selected Poems, University of Toronto Press, for Acadia University. Pages 144-147. and in 1962 he mocked both Soviet and Nazi ideology in a Greek tragedy-style stage play about the Exodus.Watson Kirkconnell (1966), Centennial Tales and Selected Poems, University of Toronto Press, for Acadia University. Page 104.
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,Erika Papp Faber (2012), A Sampler of Hungarian Poetry, Romanika Kiadó, Budapest. p. 120. which Kirkconnell rendered into the same idiom as English war poets Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, and Isaac Rosenberg,Watson Kirkconnell (1933), The Magyar Muse: An Anthology of Hungarian Poetry, 1400-1932, Foreword by Mr. Francis Herczeg, Winnipeg. Pages 184-185. remains just as popular.Tim Cross (1988), The Lost Voices of World War I, pp. 349–350.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.
Family background Watson Kirkconnell's paternal ancestors derived their surname from the village and ruined monastery of Kirkconnel. They were Presbyterians, spoke Galwegian Gaelic, wore the Clan Douglas tartan, and farmed near Kirkcudbright, in Dumfries and Galloway.Watson Kirkconnell (1967), A Slice of Canada: Memoirs, published for Acadia University by University of Toronto Press. Pages 3-4. Due to what Kirkconnell later dubbed, "the almost universal holocaust of Scottish archives during the Reformation",Watson Kirkconnell (1967), A Slice of Canada: Memoirs, published for Acadia University by University of Toronto Press. Page 4. his genealogy could not be traced with complete accuracy or linked, as he strongly suspected was the case, to a cadet branch of the Clan Douglas or Clan Maxwell lairds of Kirkconnel. Kirkconnell's own visit to his ancestral village inspired his original poem "Kirkconnell, Galloway, A.D. 600. Visited A.D. 1953". The poet pondered how much the culture of the region and the celebration of Christmas Day had changed since Kirkconnell Abbey was founded by St. Conal, a Culdee monk and missionary of the Celtic Church. The landscape, he commented, remained largely unchanged and called upon his readers to embrace the awe that their ancestors had once felt before the incarnation and birth of Jesus Christ.Watson Kirkconnell (1966), Centennial Tales and Selected Poems, University of Toronto Press, for Acadia University. Pages 132-133.
In, "an almost imperceptible little ripple in the vast tide of Scottish immigration that flowed into Canada", Walter Kirkconnell (1795–1860), the poet's great-grandfather, sailed for the New World in 1819 and settled as a pioneer in Chatham Township, Argenteuil County, Quebec. As a result of a 1953 search made at Kirkconnell's request by the Scottish Council, he learned that everyone named Kirkconnell had similarly joined the Scottish diaspora and that no one with the same surname still lived in Scotland.Watson Kirkconnell (1967), A Slice of Canada: Memoirs, published for Acadia University by University of Toronto Press. Pages 4-5.
At the time, Chatham Township was largely being settled by Gaelic-speaking evictees and voluntary immigrants from Perthshire (). Walter Kirkconnell accordingly married one of them; Mary McCallum, the daughter of John and Janet (née McDiarmid) McCallum, from the farmhouse known as "Carnban" in what is now a ruined and completely depopulated village in Glen Lyon ().Watson Kirkconnell (1967), A Slice of Canada: Memoirs, published for Acadia University by University of Toronto Press. Page 5. Reformed worship in Chatham Township continued the 16th-century practice of exclusive and unaccompanied Gaelic psalm singing in a form known as precenting the line. In her old age, Mary (née McCallum) Kirkconnell, despite having gone blind, could still sing all 154 Scottish Gaelic Metrical Psalms from memory.Watson Kirkconnell (1967), A Slice of Canada: Memoirs, published for Acadia University by University of Toronto Press. Pages 5-6.
Kirkconnell's maternal great-grandfather, Christopher Watson, emigrated from Alston, Cumberland to Upper Canada in 1819 and became a schoolmaster in York, later renamed Toronto. Christopher's youngest son, Thomas Watson, had adopted his father's profession and taught at the schools in Allanburg, Beachwood, Lundy's Lane, Stamford, and Port Hope, Ontario. In 1851, Thomas Watson had married Margaret Elma Green of Lundy's Lane, a woman descended from Welsh-American United Empire Loyalists, as well as more recent British immigrants to Canada with both German and Spanish roots.Watson Kirkconnell (1967), A Slice of Canada: Memoirs, published for Acadia University by University of Toronto Press. Pages 6-7.
Kirkconnell's parents, Thomas Kirkconnell (1862–1934) and Bertha (née Watson) Kirkconnell (1867–1957), were living in Port Hope, Ontario when their earliest children were born.Watson Kirkconnell (1967), A Slice of Canada: Memoirs, published for Acadia University by University of Toronto Press. Page 6.
Early life Watson Kirkconnell was born on 16 May 1895 in Port Hope, Ontario, where his father, Thomas Kirkconnell, was headmaster of Port Hope High School.Edited by J.R.C. Perkin (1975), The Undoing of Babel: Watson Kirkconnell - The Man and His Work, Acadia University. Page 11. Kirkconnell was a sickly child and was accordingly delayed entry for two years into Port Hope Public School and only began taking classes at the age of seven.Watson Kirkconnell (1967), A Slice of Canada: Memoirs, published for Acadia University by University of Toronto Press. Page 8. Despite the delays, Kirkconnell proved to be very academically gifted pupil and was twice allowed to skip a grade.Watson Kirkconnell (1967), A Slice of Canada: Memoirs, published for Acadia University by University of Toronto Press. Page 9.