Charles Wharton Stork


Charles Wharton Stork was an American literary author, poet, and translator.

Early life and education

Stork was born in Philadelphia on February 12, 1881 to Theophilus Baker and Hannah Stork. He graduated from Haverford College and Harvard University.
On August 5, 1908, he married Elisabeth von Pausinger, daughter of Franz Xaver von Pausinger, artist, of Salzburg, Austria. They had a daughter, Rosalie Regen, and three sons, Francis Wharton, George Frederick, and Carl Alexander. In 1939, Stork was a survivor of the sinking of the SS Athenia in the Atlantic Ocean.

Career

Stork taught in the Department of English at the University of Pennsylvania.
He wrote poems such as Beauty's Burden, Death - Divination and The Silent Folk. He translated the hymn "We Worship Thee, Almighty Lord" by Johan Olof Wallin, and some of the songs of Carl Michael Bellman. He is known to have disliked modernist literature.
His translations of the Swedish poet Gustaf Fröding were harshly criticized in reviews by Svea Bernhard and Ernst W. Olson but generally praised in an article by Axel J. Uppvall, who along with Olson had also rendered Fröding's poems into English.
Stork and his British contemporary, C. D. Locock, published several volumes of Swedish poetry in translation. Among the authors they covered were Gustaf Fröding, Erik Axel Karlfeldt, Birger Sjöberg, and August Strindberg.

Death

Stork died in Philadelphia on May 22, 1971.

Works

Day Dreams of Greece, 1909The Queen of Orplede, 1910Sea and Bay: A Poem of New England, 1916Alcibiades, 1967

Translations