I used to brag that I never suffer nostalgia, never long for the past, never desire to go back—always just steamrolling forward toward better prospects and (the hope for) greater wisdom. But I hadn’t yet met the word saudade (or been entirely honest).
Ah saudade is a doozy, a word that contains multitudes. Often such nuanced words can’t be found in our English language and require a search for a more historied foreign word. Here it’s Portuguese, with just the right mix of bittersweet.
This isn’t your grandma’s nostalgia.
From a corner of the European Union website:
Saudade: the untranslatable word for the presence of absence.
It can be used when you miss someone or something. It differs from nostalgia in that one can feel “longing” for something that may never have happened, whereas nostalgia is a sentimental longing for the happiness of an old place or period in time.
While nostalgia is your treacle, saudade leans toward savory and less tangible. There’s a future aspect to this. The temporal dissonance of both looking back and forward, the complicated feeling you might have in the presence of missing someone before they are even gone, the worry that a perfect moment you’re experiencing now is fragile. Or that the thing you miss or long for is inaccessible, may never actually exist.
I’m thinking now of the promise of America we were weened on, this shiny model of democracy and equality that, in reality, proves weaker or more elusive/illusive than we imagined since it’s not yet really built. We may never reach its Statue of Liberty shores from our aspirational boats—this American Dream.
When the Portuguese ventured abroad, they brought their saudade with them. A longing for home that comes when the emigrant is neither here or there, torn between two lands and identities. There’s the Dia da Saudade holiday in Brazil, celebrated on Jan. 30. And, from the Portulagist.com, there’s an even more dramatic neighbor:
The Galicians, who live next door to the Portuguese, have a word for saudade as well. They also have the word morriña, which is described as a “saudade so strong it can even kill.”
The way the French can embody their ennui and melancholy, the Portuguese seem to almost relish their saudade.
The Portuguese, on the other hand, seem to enjoy going through it—even if it’s ultimately more sad than happy.
As the Portuguese writer Manuel de Melo says, saudade is “a pleasure you suffer, an ailment you enjoy.”
They enjoy it so much, they often sing and dance to it. There’s a whole NPR playlist to go along with this sentiment, not always necessarily sad and lamentful (as the darker mostly minor genre of “Fado” songs are known for), but also upbeat sambo, even bubbly, lighter, happy and hopeful fare. Reflective of the “heartache you don’t let go,” a feeling to almost cherish. There is saudade for food, place, love, things you don’t even know. A handful of songs and good reflections from a few experts here:
Even Nick Cave, no big surprise there, had a case of the saudades—enough to produce a whole album around the feeling. From Wikipedia:
The Good Son, a 1990 album by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, was heavily informed by Cave’s mental state at the time, which he has described as saudade. He told journalist Chris Bohn: “When I explained to someone that what I wanted to write about was the memory of things that I thought were lost for me, I was told that the Portuguese word for this feeling was saudade. It’s not nostalgia but something sadder.”
There’s solitude built into the word, which I love and write about from time to time from my angle of isolated introvert. The sort of loneliness that haunts and yet inspires so much we might not ever wish to surrender it.
Saudade ultimately derives from the Latin solitās, solitātem, meaning “solitude”
It’s a word built for artists, and shipwrecks. It was used by poets as early as the 13th century and often was employed for those left behind in the time of the Great Portuguese Discoveries when the women and children mourned those who disappeared at sea, died in battle, or “simply never returned.”
Though the feeling is considered very Portuguese, there are similar words in other cultures, as noted by the Portulagist.com:
Many scholars have noted that a similar word exists in many other countries. The Welsh have “Hiraeth,” the Romanians have “dor,” and the Germans have “Sehnsucht.” Of course, the Germans have a word for it. They have a word for everything.
Among the cool German words worth noting, there’s the great phase packed into a compound word: torschlusspanik or “gate-closing panic.” The fear of something being shut off to you, that time is short, opportunities fleeting, and, of course, death imminent. There’s a whole different essay topic there I’m sure, along with exploring so many foreign words that are so brilliantly specific. Please share below if you know a good one we might together investigate (and by the way, if you enjoy this sort of thing, I have a whole category of such wordplay posts here).
English isn’t totally without its saudade. From Wikipedia again, the closest word we have might be “desiderium.”
Desiderium is defined as an ardent desire or longing, especially a feeling of loss or grief for something lost. Desiderium comes from the word desiderare, meaning to long for. Connections between desiderium and nostalgia have also been drawn; the former can be seen as expressing the latter for things that can’t be experienced any more, or things that someone may have never experienced themselves.
That has a nice ring to it, and maybe I’ll employ this rich desiderium more. But let’s circle back to end on the slightly more complicated note of the saudade, a word from which so many songs and poems spring. In the book In Portugal of 1912, Aubrey F. G. Bell writes:
The famous saudade of the Portuguese is a vague and constant desire for something that does not and probably cannot exist, for something other than the present, a turning towards the past or towards the future;
not an active discontent or poignant sadness but an indolent dreaming wistfulness.
Sigh. For what might you feel saudade? Why save your songs for spring?
[Appreciate what I produce here but don’t feel like committing to a paid subscription? Spare some change to Buy Me a Book.]
I love this word. Related, I've heard that the proper relation between a religious person/priest/saint and God is longing.
You've probably heard this, but here is Cesaria Evora's famous "Sodad." So beautiful. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERYY8GJ-i0I
Gorgeous. Makes me feel saudade for things I’ve never even known.