Saudade Portuguese Feeling

Saudade

Saudade is an important concept in the Portuguese and Brazilian psyche.

No other language seems to have an equivalent and the word is often rendered as nostalgia for a person or place in the past, a deep longing or yearning for a "home", which may no longer exist.

For many years, particularly during the Salazar regime an absurd chauvinistic idea was cultivated. Saudade was a unique word with no correspondence in any other language because it's a feeling only Portuguese have like no other. It is not that other people cannot experience saudade, it is that the feeling has become such an integral part of the Portuguese soul and national character.

The concept of saudade is not just nostalgia for the past but can also involve a yearning for an event in the future.

Saudade is expressed in poetry, cinema and most evidently in fado. — Saudade is expressed in poetry, cinema and most evidently in fado

History of Saudade

References to soidade go back to the ballads of 13th century Portugal.

The idea of saudade is also believed to be linked to the feelings of the sailors and their families when thousands of Portuguese men left Portugal for far away places during the Age of Discovery. Many would never see Portugal again, leaving grieving widows and children behind.

Luís de Camões (1524-1580), Portugal's greatest lyrical poet, gives expression to saudade in his classic Os Lusíadas (published in 1572). Later 19th century author Almeida Garrett explored Camões' own saudade while in exile in his biography of the poet, Camões. Contemporary author António Lobo Antunes takes up the saudade theme in his novel The Return of the Caravels (1988).

Thousands of Portuguese also left their homeland for new lives in Brazil, America, Canada, France and Germany. The annual return of these émigrés to their home villages is a form of saudosismo.

In the 19th and early 20th century later poets explored saudosismo - a reverence for nature and "a brooding sense of loneliness". Also around the time, a relatively obscure English scholar of Portuguese and Spanish literature, Aubey Bell (1881-1950) wrote this oft-quoted definition of saudade.

"Saudade 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."

Later writer Jorge Dias in 1950 set out three roots of the complex sentiment from different periods of Portuguese history. Celtic lyrical dreaming, Germanic Faustian anxiety and Arab fatalism.

Goods From Japan delivered to your home or business. — Goods From Japan delivered to your home or business

The passing of loved ones can evoke extreme feelings of saudade. — The passing of loved ones can evoke extreme feelings of saudade

Saudade in Fado

Fado, ("fate", "destiny"), is the genre of music most associated with Portugal and the Portuguese. The emotional, melancholic music reveals much about the Portuguese soul and is intimately connected with the concept of saudade.

Maro sings Saudade Saudade, Portugal's entry at the 2022 Eurovision Song Contest

Saudade in Film

Various movie directors have addressed the concept of saudade in their films. Voyage to the Beginning of the World (Viagem ao Princípio do Mundo) by Manoel de Oliveira (1908-2015) is the best known example. In Marcello Mastroianni's last movie, the Italian actor plays an aging film director named Manoel traveling with a French actor Afonso as they travel across the remote landscapes of northern Portugal. Afonso is in search of the lands described by his Portuguese-born father while Manoel seeks out the places of his childhood, now much changed.