Saudade, together with fado, is one of the symbols that best represent Portugal. It is a state of mind, a feeling born in Portuguese culture, and it is said that only a Portuguese person can explain exactly what the word means, with all its shades. In Brazil, 30 January is even celebrated as Dia da Saudade.
What it means
The word comes from the Latin solitas, "solitude", influenced by salvus and saudar, "to greet". It describes a feeling that mixes past and present: missing something or someone loved who is gone, or far away, together with the longing, sometimes the hope, to find it again. It is not just nostalgia, because it also holds a pleasure, a sweetness, and often an expectation of the future. It is a kind of melancholy joy, an ambiguous concept for the emotions it evokes, but a key to Portuguese and Brazilian culture and language. The dictionary defines it as a "nostalgic yet sweet memory of distant or lost people or things, accompanied by the wish to see or have them again".
Historical roots
Many link saudade to the history of Portugal, a country at the edge of Europe, always facing the ocean. The Portuguese have always been drawn to travel and discovery: for centuries many men left for Africa, Asia and Brazil, and those who stayed at home were overcome by sadness and longing. During long voyages, in the dreadful conditions on board, sailors too developed a strong sense of longing for their land, along with courage and resignation to the fate awaiting them. The great waves of emigration of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, to Brazil, France and the rest of the world, belong to the same story. It is the story of the discoveries and colonisation, but also of millions of family stories of departures and waiting.
A legend tells of a woman singing by the ocean while waiting for her distant lover: her song conveys thoughts and emotions, a longing at once nostalgic and happy. Saudade, after all, is also a state of love that lives on distance and hope.
Saudade and literature
Saudade has always attracted poets and writers. Already in medieval songs women sang of their absent lovers. In the sixteenth century many authors saw it as a longing for a fairer, wiser world, and Luís de Camões was its great poet, telling in The Lusiads and his lyrics of the fate of Portuguese sailors and their hope of one day returning home. In the nineteenth century Almeida Garrett opened his poem Camões by calling it "gosto amargo de infelizes", the bitter taste of the unhappy.
At the start of the twentieth century the poet Teixeira de Pascoaes founded saudosismo, a nationalist-inspired literary and spiritual movement linked to the magazine A Águia and the Renascença Portuguesa, which saw in saudade, longing for what has been lost and hope for a future good, the essence of the Portuguese soul. The young Fernando Pessoa also wrote for the magazine before going his own way, but saudade runs through his work and that of many other poets. These ideas still strongly influence how the Portuguese think of their national character.
Saudade and fado
Tradition holds that saudade feeds fado: people once expressed it in melancholy songs by the ocean. Saudade lies at the root of fado and also of Brazilian music, from samba to bossa nova (the first great bossa nova hit was called Chega de Saudade). It is a voice that gathers a multitude of feelings in an instant, the essence of life and everyday things.
A living feeling
Saudade is said to show even in the slightly sad smile of the Portuguese, young and old. But it is not an entirely negative feeling: the Portuguese live with it and draw strength and inspiration from it. It can become withdrawal, if the sense of loss prevails, but also creativity, and the Portuguese are fine witnesses to that. Many see it as part of the national identity, a way of living and feeling, a bond with the shared past and with the hope of being happy again. Spread to Brazil and wherever Portuguese culture has reached, saudade is perhaps the deepest sign of Portuguese spirituality. To learn more about the country's culture, see the page on Portuguese traditions.