Concept in Definition ABC

The word saudade belongs to the language Portuguese and Galician and presents a wide range of nuances and ideas. In a very simplified way, it means to miss or feel nostalgic for something or someone. It is a word whose meaning and deep meaning are not limited to a short sentence.

An untranslatable feeling into other languages

Saudade is a complex feeling or emotional state, since it has a contradictory aspect. Thus, this emotion is experienced when something is missed and, at the same time, it is fondly remembered. This feeling can be experienced when remembering the first love of youth, a childhood landscape or the smell of the grandparents' house. You can even feel for what has never existed.

Saudade and morriña are emotions similar but not identical. Both express a longing for something or someone that belongs to the past, but homesickness is sadder and depressive (the word morriña is originally Galician, but is also used among those who speak Spanish).

The reflections on this word come from different disciplines. For linguists its etymology is uncertain and there are several

hypothesis on its origin. From the field of the anthropology cultural, it is stated that the presence of Celtic culture in the territory de Galicia could explain the germ of this feeling.

From a philosophical point of view, saudade has been valued as an emotion associated with existential anguish and, at the same time, expresses a paradox: the presence of absence. In the psychoanalytic current it is affirmed that the emotion that is experienced has a connection with the unconscious desire to return to the mother's womb.

In saudade there is a web of emotions and ideas. Thus, we find longing and a dose of loneliness, a combination of joy and sadness, melancholy for a time that will not return and the expression of an introverted character in Portuguese and Galicians.

In the city of Lisbon

In the capital of Portugal there is a symbolic tribute to this word, as one of its streets is known as Rua da Saudade. It is not strange that this word-concept is present in the Portuguese city, since everything it transmits is related to its culture. Saudade is alive in the personality of its inhabitants, in Portuguese poetry or in fado.

Visitors to Lisbon can distinguish its air melancholic in its streets and in its people. About the Portuguese it is said that they are happy with their sadness, that they are happy in their melancholy. This apparent contradiction is reflected in a word that is difficult to translate, saudade.

Fotolia photos: Desireeferreira / Khvost

Themes in Saudade