Saudade: Presence of Absence

Algumas considerações já ouvimos várias vezes (parece que há um certo orgulho de ter em nossa língua uma palavra secreta, intraduzível...).

Saudade: the untranslatable word for the presence of absence

Michael Amoruso is a visiting assistant professor at Amherst College in Massachusetts. 1,000 words Edited by Sam Dresser

I pray for friends I’ve lost, family, like my uncle who passed away,’ Bruno told me. We were chatting in the nave of the Church of the Santa Cruz of the Souls of the Hanged, a small Catholic church in central São Paulo. Built near the old city gallows, regulars go there to pray to the dead. ‘When I’m here, I feel well,’ he said. ‘I even feel that the other side is well.’ Bruno told me there was something special about the place, that it left him with a ‘sensation’. ‘The fact that you’re remembering, recalling someone that did right by you, it leaves you with even more saudade,’ he told me.

Saudade is a key emotion word for Portuguese speakers. Though akin to nostalgia or longing, the term has no direct equivalent in English. As the Brazilian musician Gilberto Gil sings in ‘Toda saudade’, it is the presence of absence, ‘of someone or some place – of something, anyway’. One can have saudades (the singular and plural forms are interchangeable) for people or places, as well as sounds, smells, and foods. One can even have saudades for saudade itself. That is because ‘it is good to have saudades’ (é bom ter saudades), as the common saying goes. There is a certain pleasure in the feeling. Though painful, the sting of saudades is a reminder of a good that came before./.../