Why I am Portuguese

"Saudade, the mark of Portuguese culture

Among the world's languages, one of the hardest terms to translate is "saudade", the Portuguese word for a feeling, a longing for something that one is fond of, which is gone, but might return in a distant future.

It often carries a fatalist tone and a repressed knowledge that the object of longing might really never return.

Few other languages have a word with such meaning, making saudade a distinct mark of Portuguese culture. It has been said that this, more than anything else, represents what it is to be Portuguese.

"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." (In Portugal, by A.F.G Bell, 1912)

Saudade is not “nostalgia”. In nostalgia, one has a mixed happy and sad feeling, a memory of happiness but a sadness for its impossible return and sole existence in the past. Saudade is like nostalgia but with the hope that what is being longed for might return, even if that return is unlikely or so distant in the future to be almost of no consequence to the present.

One might say that nostalgia conveys a feeling one has for a loved one who has died and saudade as a feeling one has for a loved one who has disappeared or is simply currently absent. In Portuguese, the same word, nostalgia, has quite a different meaning.

Saudade is what one feels towards people, places, feelings or situations in the following circumstances:

• An old way of life that is gone
• A lost lover
• A faraway place where one was raised
• Loved ones who have died
• Feelings and stimuli one used to have but which one is now tired of
• One’s lost youth

Although it relates to feelings of melancholy and fond memories of things, people and days gone by, it can be a rush of sadness coupled with a paradoxical joy derived from acceptance of fate and the hope of recovering or replacing what is lost by something that will either fill the emptiness or provide consolation.

According to some historians, this word came to life in the 15th Century when Portuguese ships sailed to Africa and Asia. A sadness was felt for those who departed in the long journeys to the unknown seas and disappeared in shipwrecks, died in battle, or simply never returned. Those who stayed behind -- the women, children and old folks -- deeply suffered from their absence. There was the constant feeling of absence, the sadness of something that was missing, the yearning for the presence of the loved ones who had sailed."

in "Saudade, the mark of Portuguese culture"