saudade

What it means

A woman on the 28 tram in Lisbon hears a fado through an open window. She thinks of her grandmother’s kitchen in Viseu: the oilcloth, the radio, the smell of bread. The kitchen was sold in 2004. She does not want the moment to end. Saudade is that missing of someone or something absent, often for good, with a sweetness in the missing that keeps it from being plain grief.

Infopédia defines it as sorrow, nostalgia and incompleteness caused by the absence, disappearance, distance or loss of people, times, places or things you were fondly attached to and would like to have present again. Priberam starts from the pleasant side: a grateful memory of an absent person, a past moment, or something one has been deprived of. Its second sense is the pain of that deprivation. Both halves belong to the word.

It is everyday Portuguese, not a poetic rarity. Brazilians say estou com saudade, I am with saudade, after a weekend apart. The plural saudades also means regards: mande saudades, send my love. The pronunciation here is Brazilian; in Portugal the final syllable is clipped, closer to sow-DAHD.

Where it comes from

Priberam and Infopédia both trace saudade to Latin solitas, solitatis, solitude. Wiktionary gives the route: Old Galician-Portuguese soydade, suydade, soedade, from Latin solitatem. The change from oi to au is irregular, and Wiktionary suggests influence from saudar, to greet or wish good health. Infopédia still lists the old form soidade as a synonym.

Sources disagree on the date. Wikipedia places the word in 13th-century songbooks such as the Cancioneiro da Ajuda and among poets at the court of King Denis, who reigned from 1279 to 1325. Wiktionary dates the spelling saudade itself to the 16th century. Nobody coined it. English borrowed it unchanged, and Wiktionary glosses the English noun as melancholy, wistful yearning for something absent, impossible or lost.

How to use it

Estou com tanta saudade de você. (I miss you so much; literally, I am with so much saudade of you.) Everyday Brazilian Portuguese, said on the phone or in a text.

The last chapter is pure saudade: the narrator walks through the house he sold and names every room. Literary English, with the borrowed noun lower-case and unitalicised.

What it is not

Hiraeth. The Welsh word starts from bereavement. The Geiriadur Prifysgol Cymru gives grief or sadness for the lost or departed as its first sense, and it often attaches to Wales itself. Saudade is wider and lighter. A Brazilian can feel it for a friend who moved to the next town, or for last summer, and enjoy the feeling while it lasts.

Sehnsucht. Duden defines Sehnsucht as painful desire for someone or something missed or far away, and in German it can point at a life that never existed. Saudade usually remembers something that did exist: a person, a house, a year. Sehnsucht reaches forward or outward; saudade looks back and keeps the pleasure of the memory.

In the wild

• Antônio Carlos Jobim and Vinícius de Moraes, “Chega de Saudade” (“Enough Saudade”), recorded by Elizeth Cardoso in 1957 and by João Gilberto in 1958; often called the first recorded bossa nova song.
• Cesária Évora, “Sodade”, on Miss Perfumado, 1992: the Cape Verdean Creole form of the word, in a song about emigrants leaving the islands. A court ruled in 2006 that Armando Zeferino Soares wrote it.
• Darius Milhaud, Saudades do Brasil, 1919: a piano suite written after the French composer’s stay in Brazil.