About Saudades

Greetings, travelers!

I've already written about Saudades in this post 6 years ago, but I wanted to discuss it further, shall we?

The photo above was taken by my dear mother, Maria Ester, when we went together to Salvador, the Capital City of the State of Bahia, here in Brasil, back in 2017. Time flies. I feel saudades deeply.

There's a Brazilian/Portuguese-Speaker myth that "there is no exact translation for Saudades in any other language*, and I think the answer to why I referred to it as a myth is in bold: you have to always be sceptical of definite affirmations. What, then, is an exact translation for a feeling? Can you really exactly dissect what is the difference between happyness and joy? Or, in Portuguese, the difference between felicidade e alegria? Language is not as simple as ABC.

Other languages have key terms, like the Welsh-word hiraeth, that captures an intense homesickness, or the Filipino-word pangungulila, which refers to a feeling of deep yearning. But there are good translations to be made in English, blending in words and concepts; my try would be to describe it as "A profound longing for a person, a thing, a place, a time, and/or the multiple combinations of ones or all of the options, in a nostalgic and poetical-filled way of missing something that may or may not have been experienced by anyone but you, but you can never truly know if another being will ever comprehend what you feel saudade for. It just is. And it's in this singular solitude that resides the poetic and beautiful meanings of the concept.*

My conclusion, for the moment, is that words and language meanings are strictly tied to cultural and social constructions of the people who are communicating. So, in a way, there are a lot of translations for Saudades, and at the same time there is no exact one. And maybe they can be possible and impossible at the same time, and maybe they can be neither. Maybe.

"The powerful play continues, and you can contribute a verse.
What will your verse be?"