Watson Kirkconnell, (16 May 1895 – 26 February 1977) was a Canadian literary scholar, poet, linguist, 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 white supremacist and, with the exception of an intervening period in early adulthood, Kirkconnell also a life-long anti-Semite who regularly made and published literary translations of verse he admired by Jewish poets.
At the same time, due to his arguments against excessive Anglophilia 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 many many translations of their national poetry, 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, a ballad covertly denouncing the defeat of the Hungarian revolution of 1848. 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.
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. 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.
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 (). 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.
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 (1862-1934) and Bertha (née Watson) Kirkconnell (1867-1957), 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.