Watson Kirkconnell

rdf:langString Watson Kirkconnell

rdf:langString Watson Kirkconnell

rdf:langString Watson Kirkconnell

rdf:langString Wolfville, Nova Scotia, Canada

rdf:langString Port Hope, Ontario, Canada

rdf:langString President of Acadia University

rdf:langString Watson Kirkconnell, OC FRSC (16 May 1895 – 26 February 1977) was a Canadian scholar, university administrator and translator. He is well known in Iceland, Eastern and Central Europe and among Canadians of different origins for his translations of national poetry, particularly from Hungarian, Ukrainian, Russian and Serbo-Croatian. He collaborated with distinguished scholars and academics of his time in perfecting the translations, including literary critic Pavle Popović. One of his most remarkable translations is The Bards of Wales, a poem of Hungarian poet János Arany. After World War II, Kirkconnell wrote a poem about Draža Mihailović, alleging that the Serb general's execution on July 17, 1946 at the hands of Josip Broz Tito's victorious Yugoslav Partisans had followed a show trial and that charges of Chetnik war crimes in World War II and of collaboration with occupying Fascist Italian and Nazi German forces were false and trumped up. The execution solidified Communist rule in Yugoslavia for the next four decades, before the federal state ultimately disintegrated into civil war after Tito's death, when latent internal tensions were no longer being suppressed. From 1948 to 1964, he was the ninth President of Acadia University. In 1968, he was made an Officer of the Order of Canada "for his services at home and abroad as an educator, scholar and writer". In 1936, he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.