An art gallery in Toronto in 2009 entitles its exhibit “Saudades for Tomorrow,” and a politician in New Bedford, Massachusetts, defines saudade as “nostalgic longing… the spirit of Portugal.”  While a London copy-editor, apologizing for his heresy in suggesting that “saudade need only pass into English when it refers to something more metaphysical, e.g. discussing [Teixeira de] Pascoaes,” insists that “no, I don’t think it’s untranslatable.”

These not entirely incompatible views of saudade are consonant, in the main, with those of the redoubtable scholar Carolina Michaëlis in A Saudade Portuguesa:

Still, pace these authorities, the notion that saudade is a distinctly Portuguese trait, even if precise definition remains elusive, persists.  Consider these examples culled from the New York Times.  “The quality of sensitiveness, so Portuguese that it can only be expressed by the word saudade” (“Portugal and Dom Manoel,” Aug. 2, 1932); “Coimbra, with its University and indefinable air of hopeless longing, which is the Portuguese saudade” (“Portugal: Warm Sunshine and Warm Hearts,” Oct. 26, 1937); “Saudade, the deep malaise of the spirit which expresses itself in the fados of Lisbon and Coimbra” (“Lisbon: A Capital on Many Hills,” Feb. 16, 1957); “Saudade, that sadness of being parted, that permeates the Portuguese character” (“Unknown Oporto and its Environs,” Nov. 2, 1957); “Saudade, that Portuguese feeling of melancholy and acceptance, still holds sway” (“Iberian Attitudes to the New Europe,” May 16, 1966).

When we look back to earlier times for definitions of saudade in English-language texts, we find the eighteenth-century essayist, Joseph Addison adducing in the Spectator (No. 204) the authority of “Mr. Chalmers,” and writing: “The Portuguese word Saudades signifies the most refined, most tender and ardent desires for something absent, accompanied with a solicitude and anxious regard, which cannot be expressed by one word in any other language. …  So, if a person is observed to be melancholy, and is asked ‘What ails him?’ if he answers, Tenho Saudades, it is understood to mean, ‘I am under the most refined torment for the absence of my love; or from being absent from my country’ &c.”   In 1912, the Lusofile scholar Aubrey F. G. Bell offered a refinement of this definition: “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.”

Others, however, questioned the uniqueness of saudade (term and concept) to the Portuguese language and culture.  In 1900, to a reader’s query, the Baltimore Sun replied: “Saudades is a Portuguese word derived from the Latin solitas (solitude, loneliness).  Its meaning — melancholy arising from introspection and the vague yearnings of unsatisfied sentiment — is not unlike that of what the Germans call weltschmera (world-woe, pessimistic melancholy).”  More acerbic is the observation made nearly a half century earlier in “Goethe and the Satanic Philosophy,” an article published in the United States Magazine in 1854: “The ‘Sorrows of Young Werther’ seem to us about as natural and admirable in prose as a string of Portuguese Saudades [in this case a sub-genre of Brazilian song] in verse, and if we knew of anything more unnatural and nauseating than these, we would put it in their place.”

An early reference to saudade in the United States occurs in the December 13, 1845 issue of the Broadway Journal, a publication edited at the time by Edgar Allan Poe.  It appears in a note on the Portuguese writer-diplomat Almeida Garrett immediately following an unsigned review of Poe’s The Raven and Other Poems.  Culled from Terence McMahon Hughes’s The Ocean Flower (1845), this paragraph introduces Garrett, “the most eminent living writer of Portugal, indeed the only one of any considerable eminence,” followed by a twenty-six line riff on saudade taken from his Camões, a poem published in 1828, illustrating the meaning and “beauties of a word, ‘Saudade,’ upon the exclusive possession of which the Portuguese particularly pride themselves.”

Sojourning in Portugal in the mid-1850s for reasons of health—she could no longer face the prospect of another English winter—Sophia Hawthorne, the wife of the author best-remembered for the novel The Scarlet Letter, attempted to define saudades.  “A thousand sandades [sic] to you and blessed papa,” she wrote to her nine-year-old son, Julian; “sandades… means so much that I cannot translate it by one word.”  “It signifies tender remembrances, loving regards, soft hopes, precious assurances, friendship, fondness, caressing love, etc.”  She starts out bravely, but falters, her list falling away abruptly to that unsatisfactory “etc.”  When years later Julian quoted these words in Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife: a Biography (1884), a reviewer in the Atlantic Monthly, familiar with the Portuguese concept of saudade, pointed out that Julian (or it could have been the type-setter) had misread Mrs. Hawthorne’s handwriting.

 
At just about the same time that Sophia Hawthorne was explaining saudade to her son, Thomas Ewbank explained in his autobiographical account Life in Brazil (1856): “We have no word, nor half dozen words, equivalent to Saudade.  It not only implies remembrances and good-will, but a doting upon and yearning after an object.  It includes every thing that affection can desire for the absent, and hence is in common use in the correspondence of relatives and lovers.”  Without dwelling on a definition of the term, Frances S. Dabney took over the term as the simple title of her privately printed little book of sketches and prose poems on Azorean themes, people and places in 1903—a book that has only recently, in 2005, been translated into Portuguese.  Born in Fayal in 1856 into the Boston family of the Dabneys, who were prominent in business and consular matters for most of the nineteenth century on the island of Fayal, Frances Dabney offers as an epigraph to her book the following words — “D’esse tempo já passado, / D’esse tempo tão lembrado” — words for which she offers no English translation.

A half a century or so later, the Southern African poet Roy Campbell, in “The Poetry of Luiz de Camões,” a piece in London Magazine in 1957, wrote: “The Portuguese are the only people to have a word which exactly hits off that sense of brooding exile, a sort of home-sickness which can even be felt at home, that otherwise indefinable fusion of yearning with satisfaction, pain with pleasure, and resignation with unattainability — which is the keynote of their poetry, and which the word saudades conveys so perfectly, as no other word in any other language.”

For a handful of English-language writers of Portuguese descent, the idea of saudade has held its remarkably varied fascinations.  It is never far from Katherine Vaz’s fiction, in fact.  In Saudade (1994), a first novel that evolved out of several of her previously published short stories, she provides, as an epigraph, a definition of this Portuguese word (“considered untranslatable”): “Yearning so intense for those who are missing, or for vanished times or place, that their absence is the most profound presence in one’s life.  A state of being, rather than merely a sentiment.”  Indeed, so essential are notions of saudade to her work overall that one senses that she too feels the sweet pain of reaching for something in the past that is not really hers, never was, and never will be — a legitimate longing for the past of a nation and a people that as often as not never took place in the terms in which it is invoked.  Indeed her work, especially those stories that evoke her Azorean ancestry and adult Portuguese experiences, I would venture, is a touching instance of an author’s expression of her own saudades for saudade itself, a form of free-floating anxiety in search of a mooring available to her only in the writing of fiction.  It is the force behind Vaz’s historical novel, Mariana (1997), in which she appropriates (or, a better term, aproveita) Mariana Alcoforado, the supposed author of the fictional Lettres portugaises at the end of the eighteenth century, giving the love-stricken nun an imagined daily life unvanquished by the absence of her departed French lover.  One senses that for this author there is, perhaps, something of the rue (and poignancy) expressed with such sad finality in the lines from Mário de Sá-Carneiro, Fernando Pessoa’s great friend, that appear above as an epigraph to this piece, lines that provided António Ferro, another of Pessoa’s friends, with an epigraph and a title for his book of poems — Saudades de Mim (Saudades of Myself).

Less personal cultural definitions of saudade appear in the work of other contemporary English-language writers of Portuguese descent.  Erika D. Vasconcelos, Anthony De Sa, and Julian Silva, for example, have each had a try at defining saudade.  In her first novel, My Darling Dead Ones (1997), Vasconcelos writes: “There is a type of song they still sing in the narrow streets of the Alfama, where you can touch your neighbour’s house by stretching your arm out of a window, and it is called fado.  The Portuguese fado, Magdalena will tell you, originated from African slave songs that Portuguese sailors transformed to express their own longing, the loneliness of a life at sea.  They call it, this longing, saudade, ‘a kind pain that you enjoy,’ she says, quoting a famous poet.  ‘The Portuguese fado is saudade put to music,’ she says.  But the name of the song has another meaning as well: it means fate.”  In Barnacle Love (2008), Anthony De Sa, Vasconcelos’s fellow Canadian, evokes saudade right off, on the second page of the first story in his book: “The Portuguese call it saudade; a longing for something so indefinite as to be indefinable.  Love affairs, miseries of life, the way things were, people already dead, those who left and the ocean that tossed them on the shores of a different land — all things born of the soul that can only be felt.”  On the other hand, Julian Silva, a third-generation Portuguese-American whose principal literary roots are not Portuguese, but English — Henry James, prominently, and the Brontës — writes in The Death of Mae Ramos (2007): “Entranced by the golden shadows shimmering on the blood-red surface of his glass, he shivered again, so dizzy for an instant he feared he might faint.  Saudade!  It was the definitive Portuguese vice.  A penchant for licking one’s wounds while longing — not without a certain degree of self-dramatization — for the impossible.  Since only the impossible was ever worthy of one’s longing.  What was must, by its very existence, prove inadequate.”  This canny definition — and I say it with respect and admiration—evokes in me echoes of the great English Decadents, poets such as Lionel Johnson and Ernest Dowson, for example, who lived lives of saudade, though the term itself was probably unknown to them.

The word saudade has meant many things to the Portuguese people.  It has even been the basis for a whole way of looking at the country and its people, a philosophy, if you will and do not insist on too precise a definition of either word — saudade or philosophy.  Underlying its many meanings, however, is the prevailing impression that it is, more often than not, backward-looking.  Even those projects and predictions for a better future seem to be shadowed by nostalgia for a time that is no more.  It may be that “to remember is to live” (recordar é viver, as folk wisdom has it); but what is intriguing about the lives (all-too-too briefly) shown here is that those who lived them seem not to have been as dramatically burdened by saudades as, given the literature, one might have expected.  As for saudades de saudade, those belong to the foreign-born, non-native descendants of Portuguese emigrants.

Everybody — well, a lot of writers — take a crack at defining saudade.  The Portuguese writer sees it as something of a duty, a responsibility, to trace its familiar contours is a privately public way.  Non-Portuguese writers are more heuristic, wishing to convey its essence to those not in the know.  Here is Roy Campbell, the English poet from South Africa, explaining his decision to entitle his translation of Joaquim Paço d’Arcos’s Poemas Imperfeitos as Nostalgia and its near-cousin saudade:

The original title of this book of lyrical memories, Poemas Imperfeitos, does not translated satisfactorily into English as “Uncompleted Poems.”  “Nostalgia” comes nearer to expressing not the title but the mood of these poems since it is the nearest word we have to express “Saudades,” that blend of enjoyable melancholy with tender memory and regrets, which the Portuguese, whose home, for so many centuries, has been the wide world and the seven seas—feels for any part of that wide home in which he has sojourned.  The Portuguese is at home anywhere on sea or land: he does not have to reconstruct his home-country abroad before he can feel at home in his colonies, or in foreign lands. The very ocean, as Fernando Pessoa, greatest of modern Portuguese poets, writes in Mensagem, is salt with the tears of Portuguese widows, mothers and sweethearts, who have lost their husbands, sons or lovers at sea or overseas. Far continents and the horizons of the oceans have a greater significance for the Portuguese than they have for any other European nation, for they not only mean grief, hardship, toil, and death, but livelihood, sustenance, wealth, power, and life itself.  “Saudades,” however, are inherent, in varying forms, in the poetry and music of all Celtic and Celtiberian peoples, from the love-lilts of the Hebrides to the medieval barcarolas of the Portuguese and the modern fados which are so popular in Lisbon today. “Saudades” embody that wistful yet smiling melancholy with which Baudelaire sees Surgir du fond des eaux le Regret souriant.

Here, on the other hand, is the English writer, John Berger’s try at defining saudade.  In Here is Where We Meet (2005) he writes:

 
Interestingly, Berger’s definition of saudade has nothing to do, I suspect, with any Lisboeta’s feel for the term, the concept or the emotion.  The important thing is that Berger discovers in his own experience a personal objective correlative for Portuguese saudade — the persisting meaning of the term “too late” as he remembers it said by his now ten-years-dead mother.

For evidence that saudade works in ordinary, that is to say, non-literary lives, however, it is our good fortune to have Saudade (1990), an hour-long video documentary on the subject of Portuguese immigration to the United States.  In this work we are made privy to a body of expressions, gestures, and signs indicative of saudade as it functions (or does not function) in the days and works of individualized human beings.  Focusing on emigrants living in the New Bedford, Massachusetts, area, the Brazilian sociologist Bela Feldman-Bianco allows a small group of individuals to tell their particular stories.  In the aggregate, the story told offers a valuable illustration of the way saudade has held them in a kind of consoling anxiety often leading to some creative act in their everyday lives or decision for the future.

A twice-widowed Micaelense woman wants to die in her homeland and be buried with her family—parents, brother, husband—because it is her “place” or “corner.”  Her notion is frugal, too, for she owns a burial plot.  She visits her island annually, but, tellingly, she continues to live in America and to study English. A middle-aged clothing worker mata as saudades for his native Azores (that is, he satisfies his longing for his homeland by “killing” them) through concentrating on his garden this side of the Atlantic.  Eight hours of piece-work at the shop are made tolerable by the eight hours he will spend each day working to make things grow, reproducing a little piece of his island in this less hospitable place.

An older woman recalls her youth as a striker walking picket lines, learning songs of solidarity and the ways of the labor union, and her discovery of the joys of amateur theater where, over the years, she has played dramatic roles, always dramatic roles.  A fisherman, honored on Portuguese Communities Day (June 10, 1988) for his longevity, talks about his life as an emigrant.  He worked in factories at first but soon went back to the sea, not because of a passion for fishing, but because the sea offered him a “freer” life.  Asked if he misses the sea, he says quietly and immediately “no.”  In fact, it is clear that he does not miss or have any saudades for the sea or for anything else.  Fishing attracted him because there was always something to learn and something to survive, he adds later.

A winemaker taps a barrel and tastes his wine. “I’m always first,” he says. “If I drink it then anybody can drink it.”  Having left Madeira under false pretenses at the age of thirteen, he expresses no regrets at having done so, no sense of saudade, except, perhaps, when the camera catches him looking down as his son recites a poem about the pictures of his “family,” dispersed throughout several countries with children and relatives never seen.  These pictures “sweeten” the walls of the house he has built with his own hands. But it is the wine that gladdens him; not entirely, one suspects, the drinking of it, but the recurring miracle of making it, and making it good.

There is a young woman graduate of the University of Coimbra who was denied her first job (by a Portuguese) because though an emigrant she had not “suffered” enough.  The images that flash before the viewer without comment and that show the changes in her hair are indication enough of her acculturation. But, the most acculturated person in the group of seven is the son of emigrants who became the president of a national labor union.  He tells of the family pressure on him and on other Portuguese boys to “marry their own kind.”  Yet, neither he nor the friends who are gathered at his house on the day the film is being shot did that. They married “French,” “English,” what have you, and everything has worked out fine.

Through her choice of seven principals for her film, Feldman-Bianco is able to present not the seven ages of man, but the seven ages of immigration, and, if you will, the seven forms of acculturation.  Viewers might disagree on how to describe these seven ages and seven forms, but this organization is one of the great strengths of this finely conceived and shrewdly composed film. What comes through is that these are seven “lived” lives. “Saudade” is a hook more narrowly and traditionally useful to the filmmaker (and the voice-over) than it is to the human beings whose collective sense of saudade reflects a wide range of emigrant strategies.

It is almost as if, then, that saudade has had as many meanings nearly as there have been individual beings familiar with the concept and convinced of its emotional force.  Sooner or later, even those who are most skeptical seem to find in the idea of saudade either uneasiness or comfort — or, better still, simultaneously.

And yet.  And yet…   If the word saudade means so many things that it takes, in English, for example, many different words, in their aggregate, to get at what saudade means to the Portuguese, might it not be a case, not of the richness of the word, but of the parsimony of Portuguese to list all those traits and emotions, etc. in a single word rather than using an umbrella term for what is, of course, felt and experienced by “others,” that is to say, other than Portuguese.  Put it another way, does saudade have an integrity in itself, giving it an existence as a thing, making it different from all the feelings that, it is said, comprise it?  Is saudade “the national mood,” as Peter Conrad says in a recent New Yorker essay on António Lobo Antunes, “a nostalgia for some remote, unremembered epoch during which the Portuguese were happy and their country ruled the waves”?  Or is its meaning actually dictated by its immediate context, colored by it local circumstances?  Or is it that what is unique about saudade, in the final analysis, is that Portuguese insistent that it is untranslatable, and as such an unmistakable and perfectly safe part of their national, if not racial, patrimony.  After all, the term continues to be utterly serviceable.  “Saudades (missing you),” is “a favorite Portuguese word,” one still commonly used as a complimentary close in personal letters, so explained Elizabeth Bishop, the American poet, an outsider then living in Portuguese-speaking Brazil.  But maybe, after all is said and done, it is really a matter of translation (or mis-translation).  After all, as Robert Frost once warned, “That’s the trouble with translations.  You gotta know both languages — from — to — so’s the sense carries across.”  In the particular instance of saudade, however, even knowing both languages may not be enough to carry the full sense across, especially if, as Ortega y Gasset observes, “La saudade no es um tema portugués, sino el tema portugués per excelencia.”  Exactly — epitomized as saudade de saudade.

Image by Sigrun Guggenberger

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George Monteiro, professor emeritus of English and of Portuguese and Brazilian Studies at Brown University, is the author or editor of books on Henry James, Henry Adams, Robert Frost, Stephen Crane, Emily Dickinson, Fernando Pessoa, and Luis de Camões, among others. He served as Fulbright lecturer in American Literature in Brazil–São Paulo and Bahia–Ecuador and Argentina; and as Visiting Professor in UFMG in Belo Horizonte. In 2007 he served as Helio and Amelia Pedroso / Luso-American Foundation Professor of Portuguese, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. Among his recent books are Stephen Crane’s Blue Badge of Courage, Fernando Pessoa and Nineteenth-Century Anglo-American Literature, The Presence of Pessoa, The Presence of Camões, Conversations with Elizabeth Bishop, Critical Essays on Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, Fernando Pessoa and Nineteen-Century Anglo-American Literature and Elizabeth Bishop in Brazil and After: A poetic Career Transformed. Among his translations are Iberian Poems by Miguel Torga, A Man Smiles at Death with Half a Face by José Rodrigues Miguéis, Self-Analysis and Thirty Other Poems by Fernando Pessoa, and In Crete, with the Minotaur, and Other Poems by Jorge de Sena. He has also published two collections of poems, The Coffee Exchange and Double Weaver’s Knot. More…