Saudade: meaning, etymology and the history of a word

The Priberam dictionary of the Portuguese language gives two senses in the singular, and you need both together: the pleasant memory of an absent person, a past moment or a thing one is deprived of; and the regret, the pain that deprivation causes. It is that double bottom that resists translation by a single word: saudade is the pleasure of the memory and the want, in the same second.

In the plural the word changes jobs. The same dictionary records two uses with nothing painful left in them. Good memories, with this grating example: a antiga chefe não deixou saudades, the former boss left no regrets behind her. And simply greetings: mande-lhe saudades minhas, send her my saudades, that is, give her my regards.

A third surprise in the same entry: saudades is also a plant, the sweet scabious (Scabiosa atropurpurea), then by extension several flowering species, then the flower itself. So the word serves to mourn an absent person, to greet a living one and to name what you put in a vase.

From Latin. Priberam gives solitas, -atis, solitude. Carolina Michaëlis de Vasconcelos, in A saudade portuguesa (Porto, 1914), starts from the feminine plural solitates and notes that everyone who had written on the question before her, Portuguese and foreign alike, already recognised that etymon. The starting sense is therefore not missing somebody: it is the state of the one left alone.

The form, on the other hand, moved four times. Michaëlis reconstructs first soedade, which she calls prehistoric because she finds no Portuguese example of it; then soidade, documented in the thirteenth century in the songs of King Denis; then suidade, the form writers preferred until 1580; and finally saudade. Camões still used soidade and saudade interchangeably. And in the mouths of the people of Lisbon, in 1914, she already hears a sixth state: sòdade.

The shift from soi- to sau- is the anomaly of the affair, and Michaëlis says so plainly: it is not a sound change. Portuguese normally goes the other way, from au towards oi or ou (causa gives coisa and cousa, auru gives oiro and ouro). To explain the opposite she turns to analogy and folk etymology: the word would have been pulled towards the family of saudar, to greet, and saúde, health, the health that letters wish an absent person before ending on a thousand saudações. She presents this as a hypothesis, not a law.

That fusion would have had a consequence for the meaning: on her account it is what rid saudade of the idea of solitude, which was left to soidão and solidão. Another track comes up regularly, the Arabic suwaydāʾ, black humour, hypochondria, melancholy. Carlos Rocha, for Ciberdúvidas da Língua Portuguesa, holds the Latin etymology the more probable and writes that the Arabic track has been defended without success: any influence would still have to be established by fairly rigorous philological work.

Since the fifteenth century at least. King Edward of Portugal (Duarte in Portuguese) wrote a book of morals, the Leal Conselheiro, the Loyal Counsellor, whose chapter XXV sorts the sorrows of the heart: tristeza, nojo, pesar, desprazer, avorrecymento, and suydade. Reaching that one, he rules: “E porem me parece este nome de suydade tam próprio que o latym, nem outro linguagem que eu saiba, nom he pêra tal sentido semelhante.” Neither Latin, nor any other language he knows of. The caution matters: that he knows of.

Two centuries later Francisco Manuel de Melo takes up the idea in his Epanáforas (Lisbon, 1660) and believes himself the first: “tenho por certo, que fui eu o primeiro neste reparo”. He defines saudade as a passion so subtle that pain and satisfaction are confused in it, “He hum mal, de que se gosta, & hum bem, que se padece”, an ill one enjoys and a good one suffers, and gives it two parents, love and absence.

In 1842 the king’s editor, José Inácio Roquete, settles the matter in a footnote: no, Melo was not the first to express that thought, and so that readers can judge for themselves he copies several passages underneath. If nobody had noticed earlier, it is because the king’s book could not be found. Portuguese chroniclers spoke of it without having seen it; only in 1820 was it known where the manuscript lay, in the Royal Library in Paris, and twenty-two more years passed before it was printed. The editor believes he holds the very copy the king gave queen Leonor, his wife, and admits he has no idea how it reached France.

Between the two, a poet. Exiled in Paris, Almeida Garrett opens his poem Camões (1825) on the word: “Saudade! gosto amargo de infelizes, / Delicioso pungir de acerbo espinho”, bitter taste of the unhappy, delicious pricking of a harsh thorn. His note A is more careful than his verse: the feeling, he writes, every country knows, but a separate word to say it he knows in no language other than Portuguese. He also proposes an etymology there, solitudo, and offers the Latin desiderium as a makeshift, with Horace in support.

The sharpest statement is the latest. On the evening of 23 May 1912, at the Ateneu Comercial in Porto, the poet Teixeira de Pascoaes spoke for the Renascença Portuguesa and declared: “Sim: a palavra Saudade é intraduzivel.” For him the word is not a dictionary curiosity, it is the collective soul of a people held in a single utterance, born of the marriage of pagan desire and Christian pain, and from it he draws a religion and a philosophy, saudosismo. He prefers to Garrett’s definition another, which he attributes to Duarte Nunes de Leão: saudade is the memory of a thing together with the desire for that thing.

It is argued over, and the best-argued answer is an old one. In A saudade portuguesa (1914), Carolina Michaëlis de Vasconcelos, a philologist and the author of a history of Portuguese literature written in German, judges inexact the idea that other nations would not know this feeling, and illusory the claim, already nearly four centuries old in her view, that the word has no equivalent in any language on earth.

She lines up four neighbouring words in the Iberian peninsula, all of Neo-Latin origin: Castilian soledad, Asturian senhardade (from singularitate), Galician morrinha, Catalan anyoransa, which Ausiàs March used freely. None, she grants, corresponds fully to the Portuguese term, and above all none weighs as heavily in its own language. With German, on the other hand, she speaks of full agreement: the Sehnsucht of Goethe’s Mignon, whose line Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt she renders in Portuguese as Só quem conhece a saudade.

She denies nothing for all that. Neither that this want may have been commoner in Portugal than elsewhere, in the centuries of the Discoveries and of distant conquests; nor that saudade is a trait of the Portuguese psyche, more so than Sehnsucht is of the German soul, in which she finds more resistance. She also notes that German Sehnsucht usually has a metaphysical character, turned towards the beyond. Her postscript of April 1914 is frank: having finally read the lectures of saudosismo, she sometimes parts from their authors and sometimes joins them.

The scepticism is older still than she is. Michaëlis points to a letter of 1593, from João da Silva e Meneses, fourth count of Portalegre, to Magdalena de Bovadilla: it shows that saudade already passed for a properly Portuguese word, and its author, himself Portuguese, mocks the use and the abuse made of it in defending its absolute agreement with Castilian soledad.

The closest cousins, in any case, are just north of the Minho. Michaëlis notes that suidade remains the liveliest form in the mouths of the Galician people, used too by poets such as Rosalía de Castro. Pascoaes, for his part, counted the Galicians among the only people who feel saudade, at the cost of a formula that dates him: Galicia is a piece of Portugal under the paw of the lion of Castile.

The date of the first written saudade. Michaëlis points to two passages of an Alcobaça codex, number 266, in a Life of Saint Amaro, where the word appears with its present sense at a time when everyone still said soidade. If the hand really is fourteenth century and if the text’s editor, Otto Klob, read correctly, it has to be accepted. She doubts it for the first passage, which she believes was corrected from saúde, and asks that a Romance scholar in Lisbon go back and look at the manuscript.

Then the why of the sau-. That the word was pulled towards saúde and saudar explains by what was in the speaker’s head what no sound law explains, and Michaëlis offers it as nothing more. Garrett, for his part, derived saudade from solitudo by way of solidão, soidão, soledade, soidade: he came close without arriving, the accepted etymon being solitas, solitates, while solitudo gave solidão.

And the main thing, which is not a question of linguistics. That one feeling is more Portuguese than another can be neither proved nor refuted in a dictionary. Michaëlis separates two things the debate confuses: the word has equivalents, and it does not have the standing of its equivalents in their own languages. Those who call it untranslatable are mostly talking about the second.