Watson Kirkconnell
Watson Kirkconnell 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 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, 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.
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. Due to what Kirkconnell later dubbed, "the almost universal holocaust of Scottish archives during the Reformation", 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.In, "an almost imperceptible little ripple in the vast tide of Scottish immigration that flowed into Canada", Walter Kirkconnell, 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.
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 McCallum, from the farmhouse known as "Carnban" in what is now a ruined and completely depopulated village in Glen Lyon. 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 Kirkconnell, despite having gone blind, could still sing all 154 Scottish Gaelic Metrical Psalms from memory.
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.
Kirkconnell's parents, Thomas Kirkconnell and Bertha Kirkconnell, were living in Port Hope, Ontario when their earliest children were born.
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. 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. Despite the delays, Kirkconnell proved to be very academically gifted pupil and was twice allowed to skip a grade.Kirkconnell later credited his love of poetry to the influence of his maternal grandfather, Thomas Watson, who he later described as a, "grey-bearded... pillar of the local Methodist church". Thomas Watson used to reward his grandson by giving him one cent for every stanza he memorized from Divine and Moral Songs by Isaac Watts. Kirkconnell later recalled, "From an entire volume thus committed to memory, I gained considerable cash, indelible recollections of many edifying verses, and an indelible love of prosody. Neither of us dreamt that back of several of Watts' poems lay the fine Latin hymns of the Polish Jesuit Kazimierz Sarbiewski."
Kirkconnell further recalled that his "first awareness of small town journalism came" after his "second Christmas-time promotion". The Port Hope Guide reported that "a local lawyer" had angrily protested during a school board meeting that his son has not been similarly promoted and accused Watson Kirkconnell of having been "shoved", solely because his father was the headmaster of Port Hope High School. For this reason, the Kirkconnell family felt both vindicated and overjoyed the following summer, after the same newspaper published the results of the Provincial "Entrance Examinations". These proved that the headmaster's controversial son had scored, "nearly fifty points higher than anyone else in town or county."
At the age of twelve, Kirkconnell asked for and received both baptism and membership in the Port Hope Baptist Church. According to J.M.R. Beveridge, "Thus began his commitment to Christianity which, although subjected to periods of doubt, sometimes perhaps even approaching despair, survived and matured. Throughout his adult life he played an active and on many occasions leading role in the Baptist denomination." Kirkconnell, however, seriously considered leaving the Baptist faith as a young man, and as an older man was far more ecumenical and critical in his approach to Evangical Christianity than many of his Baptist peers were comfortable with. For example, writing in his memoirs that Evangelicals who "ignorantly or deliberately disregard Zoroastrian elements in early Hebrew thinking... are noisy without knowledge" and expressing "more love for poetry than theology."
Also as a child in Port Hope, Kirkconnell's interest in geology was sparked by attending a lecture about local prehistory, Ice Age glaciers, and the Glacial Lake Iroquois by Arthur Philemon Coleman, who was visiting from the University of Toronto. Afterwards, Kirkconnell recalls, "walking and cycling through the countryside now took on a new meaning", and after the family moved to Lindsay, Ontario in 1908, Kirkconnell continued to research local prehistory and how it had shaped the landscape.
By the time he graduated high school, Kirkconnell had learned Latin, French, German, and Greek, and had been exposed to works of comparative philology. He later wrote, "The labours of my lifetime have been more in the field of language study than in any other."
In 1913, at the urging of his father, Kirkconnell began studies at his father's alma mater of Queen's University at Kingston. Even though mathematics had been his best subject in high school, Kirkconnell proceeded to honours in Classics and graduated as a double medallist in Latin and Greek. He received a Master of Arts degree in 1916.