Portuguese (also Galician)

saudade

saudade · European Portuguese roughly sow-DAH-də [sɐwˈðaðɨ]; Brazilian sow-DAH-jee [sawˈdadʒi]

longing-in-absence

What the gloss loses: “Nostalgia” looks backward and often enjoys itself too quickly. “Homesickness” wants a place. “Melancholy” need not have an object. Saudade is object-love under the condition of absence, and it includes the possibility that the absence is permanent. It is closer to a relationship than to a mood.

Etymology

From Latin sōlitās, sōlitātis, “solitude, loneliness,” through archaic Portuguese soidade / suidade. The diphthong au is commonly explained by later influence from saudar, “to greet,” from Latin salūtāre. The word is already in 13th-century Galician-Portuguese songbooks (soidade).

An alternative derivation from Arabic sawdāʾ (سوداء), “black bile, melancholy,” has been proposed and is not the majority view among etymologists. It remains part of the word’s cultural argument about itself: Latin solitude or Arabic melancholy, which absence is Portugal heir to? Most historical linguists follow the Latin path. The Arabic theory should be reported as a theory.

Saudade is not a borrowing of English “nostalgia.” Nostalgia is a 1688 Swiss medical coinage (nóstos + álgos, homesickness as disease). Saudade is centuries older, and it is not only homesickness.

Morphology · Feminine noun. Plural saudades. Verb saudar is etymologically adjacent (via the later blending) but means “to greet.” One “has saudades” of someone: ter saudades.

Historical use

In the cantigas de amigo, soidade is what a woman-voiced speaker has of the beloved who has gone to the sea or to the king’s war. The feeling is already double: pain, and the wish to keep the pain because it is the form the beloved still takes.

Later Portuguese writing (Camões; the fado tradition; Brazilian modernism; Pessoa) makes saudade a national emblem, which is both a glory and a danger. Emblems stop being verbs. The word still does ordinary work: one has saudades of a person, a city, a time of day.

Galician saudade / morriña neighbor it. Brazilian Portuguese carries the word across the Atlantic, where it picks up other distances: the ocean, the sertão, the people who did not come back.

Semantic range

Longing for someone or something absent, with the awareness they may not return.
The pleasure inside that longing, the way absence becomes a companion.
Homesickness, but not only that.
A posture toward time: missing what was, what might have been, what never was.

Semantic change

Tourist Portuguese and English essays on “untranslatable words” have turned saudade into a brand of bittersweetness. The older word is starker. Duarte Nunes de Leão: memory of something with a desire for it. Memory plus desire. Not a mood candle.

Source · The Galician-Portuguese cantigas de amigo (13th century), where soidade is not a philosophy of the Portuguese soul but a woman singing toward a ship.

Sanskrit viraha, Japanese koi, English longing, German Sehnsucht: each is a technology for living toward someone who is not here. Spanish soledad kept the Latin “solitude” and did not become this word. That fork is the history.

An open question

Does saudade keep the absent one present, or does it replace them with the feeling that bears their name?