Charles Wharton Stork


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

Life

Charles Wharton Stork was born in Philadelphia on 12 February 1881 to Theophilus Baker and Hannah Stork. He graduated from Haverford College and Harvard University and taught in the Department of English at the University of Pennsylvania. He died in Philadelphia on 22 May 1971.
On 5 August 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.
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.

Works