Pádraig Phiarais Cúndún (177713 March 1857) was an Irish poet who emigrated to the United States, where he continued composing poetry in Munster Irish and contributed to literature in the Irish language outside Ireland.

Life

Cúndún was born in Ballymacoda, County Cork, and likely learned to read and write in the

Irish language Irish (Standard Irish: ), also known as Irish Gaelic or simply Gaelic ( ), is a Celtic language of the Indo-European language family. It is a member of the Goidelic languages of the Insular Celtic sub branch of the family and is indigenous ...

at a local hedge school. He emigrated to America with his family around 1826 and settled with them on a frontier homestead near Deerfield, New York. There were many other Irish-immigrants in and around Deerfield and Cúndún was easily able to remain a

monoglot Monoglottism (Greek μόνος ''monos'', "alone, solitary", + γλῶττα , "tongue, language") or, more commonly, monolingualism or unilingualism, is the condition of being able to speak only a single language, as opposed to multilingualism. ...

Irish-speaker and never learned the

English language English is a West Germanic language that developed in early medieval England and has since become a English as a lingua franca, global lingua franca. The namesake of the language is the Angles (tribe), Angles, one of the Germanic peoples th ...

. Meanwhile, he regularly wrote and received letters in Irish from his relatives and former neighbors and remained in close contact with events in Ballymacoda. Cúndún died in Deerfield in 1857. He is buried at St. Agnes Cemetery in

Utica, New York Utica () is the county seat of Oneida County, New York, United States. The tenth-most populous city in New York, its population was 65,283 in the 2020 census. It is located on the Mohawk River in the Mohawk Valley at the foot of the Adiro ...

Legacy

The Irish language poetry that Cúndún composed in America survives through the letters he wrote to his relatives and former neighbors in Ballymacoda and due to the fact that his son, "Mr. Pierce Condon of South Brooklyn", arranged for two of his father's poems to be posthumously published by the New York City newspaper ''The Irish-American'' in 1858. The first collection of Cúndún's Irish language poetry was edited by

Risteard Ó Foghludha Risteard Ó Foghludha (5 March 1871 – 20 August 1957) was an Irish-language teacher, journalist and editor from near Youghal, County Cork. Early life His father Richard (1830–1910) was a farmer and Margaret (Peg) Long was his mother. He w ...

and published in 1932. Kerby A. Miller also repeatedly quoted Cúndún's poetry in the 1985 book ''Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America''. His poetry and letters also continue to be consulted by scholars. Along with fellow Irish-language poets Diarmuid na Bolgaí Ó Sé and Máire Bhuidhe Ní Laoghaire, Pádraig Phiarais Cúndún adapted the Jacobite tradition of

Aisling The , , approximately ), or vision poem, is a mythopoeic poetic genre that developed during the late 17th and 18th centuries in Irish language poetry. The word may have a number of variations in pronunciation, but the ''is'' of the first s ...

poetry to more recent political struggles by the Irish people. Therefore, Cúndún's poetry helped inspire the verse of more recent Irish-language poets such as Seán Gaelach Ó Súilleabháin, who adapted the Aisling tradition to the events of the

Easter Rising The Easter Rising (), also known as the Easter Rebellion, was an armed insurrection in Ireland during Easter Week in April 1916. The Rising was launched by Irish republicans against British rule in Ireland with the aim of establishing an ind ...

of 1916 and the

Irish War of Independence The Irish War of Independence (), also known as the Anglo-Irish War, was a guerrilla war fought in Ireland from 1919 to 1921 between the Irish Republican Army (1919–1922), Irish Republican Army (IRA, the army of the Irish Republic) and Unite ...

. Kenneth E. Nilsen, an American linguist with a specialty in

Celtic languages The Celtic languages ( ) are a branch of the Indo-European language family, descended from the hypothetical Proto-Celtic language. The term "Celtic" was first used to describe this language group by Edward Lhuyd in 1707, following Paul-Yve ...

, referred to Cúndún as "the most notable Irish

speaker to arrive in this country". Nilsen also stated that Cúndún's "letters and poems, written in upstate New York to his neighbors in Ballymacoda, County Cork, represent the most important body of Pre-Famine writing in Irish from the United States".

References

1777 births 1856 deaths 19th-century Irish-language poets American Irish-language poets American poets of Irish descent American Catholic poets Christian clergy from County Cork Irish Catholic poets Irish emigrants to the United States People from Deerfield, New York Poets from New York (state) Writers from County Cork Writers from Utica, New York {{Ireland-poet-stub