Saudade
“(…) the more untranslatable words a language has, the more character the people who speak it demonstrate(…). And it is through the psychological study of these words (…) that we can define its soul or character, its spiritual personality, and then to conclude its social and human destiny.”
Teixeira de Pascoaes
Every language has untranslatable words. Words like the french “flâneur”, the german “sehnsucht” and “wanderlust” certainly cause admiration in those who hear them for the first time. Upon listening the description of these strange words, some may claim that these concepts also exist in their culture - my opinion is that if such concept existed in their society, their language would have a word for it. In Portugal there are no “flâneurs”, nobody feels “sehnsucht” and definitely nobody feels “wanderlust” (my mind cannot even grasp the concept of this word); what we do feel is saudade.
What is Saudade
Saudade is a sweet and bitter feeling. It’s not longing, because longing means “ansiar” in portuguese, nor nostalgia we also have the word nostalgia, and has not the same meaning. To have saudades is to remember something, feeling happiness, then desire to have the same experience again and then to feel pain because you lost it, and then hope that somehow you may have it again. This happens all at the same time, giving the bitter-sweet feeling. Saudade is also different from missing something: we have the expression “sentir falta de” to express that emotion, when you feel the absence of a loved one, object or place, but is an entirelly painfull feeling, not bitter sweet.
"And when I say Saudade, I say Portuguese Soul. She is born from the marriage of the pagan carnal Desire with the Christian Spiritual Pain - Saudade is also Sadness and Joy, Light and Shadow, Life and Death.”
Teixeira de Pascoaes
An exclusive word and emotion?
Carolina Michaelis de Vasconcelos, an academic, considers that other languages may have words whose meaning is close to the meaning of saudade but “it is certain that they do not correspond completely to the portuguese term. Above all, it is certain, they do not have (…) the quid, the je ne sais quoi, the mysteriousness inherent to it”1. She proceeds to present the reader to the german word “Sehnsucht”, a closer match to Saudade, “but generally the german Sehnsucht has a methaphysical character. It aspires to states and regions that are ideal, superhuman, to the After-Life”2. I looked up the word “Sehnsucht” and it is also a word without translation in any language and the feeling it describes seems to be a very profound and beautiful feeling, one that sets things into motion. It doesn’t mean “Saudade”, because “Sehnsucht” is a desire that makes people move, for instance this saying: “Wenn die Sehnsucht größer ist als die Angst, wird der Mut geboren” 3 means that when Sehnsucht is greater than fear then courage is born - the word Saudade could never be used in this way.
Teixeira de Pasocaes, a poet-philosopher, believed in the exclusive nature of this word: “We are, truly, the only people who can say that in their language exists an untranslatable word, in which all its colective soul is condensed”4; and the exclusive nature of the emotion: “The only people who feel saudades is the portuguese, including maybe the galicians, because Galiza is a piece of Portugal”5. He ackowleges that other people feel different types of pain due to loss, but are not the same as “saudade”6.
Importance for the Portuguese
“By the end of the 16th century, Saudade was almost considered a national philosophy or religion”
Carolina Michaelis de Vasconcelos
The significance the word saudade has in Portugal is not due to its untranslatable character, as I wrote above the existence of such words is common in every language, but because saudade became the way of life, the philosophy of life of the portuguese people.
In the 20th century a philosophical and literary movement was created based on saudade, it was called Saudosismo. I will later write about it.
I hope you enjoyed this newsletter!
VASCONCELOS, Carolina Michaelis de, Saudade Portuguesa, Edição da Renascença Portuguesa, Porto, III, págs. 33-4
VASCONCELOS, Carolina Michaelis de, Saudade Portuguesa, Edição da Renascença Portuguesa, Porto, III, págs 34-5
https://www.iamexpat.de/education/education-news/german-words-expats-should-know-sehnsucht
PASCOAES, Teixeira de, O Espírito Lusitano ou o Saudosismo
PASCOAES, Teixeira de, O Espírito Lusitano ou o Saudosismo
PASCOAES, Teixeira de, O Espírito Lusitano ou o Saudosismo
Thank you for this post. The concept of saudade feels like it has significant overlap and kinship with the Russian toska. As per Nabokov:
Toska - noun /ˈtō-skə/ - Russian word roughly translated as sadness, melancholia, lugubriousness.
"No single word in English renders all the shades of toska. At its deepest and most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause. At less morbid levels it is a dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for, a sick pining, a vague restlessness, mental throes, yearning. In particular cases it may be the desire for somebody of something specific, nostalgia, love-sickness. At the lowest level it grades into ennui, boredom.”