Saudade

2nd Blog, April 2021

What's in a Name? That which we call 'Saudade', by any other name, would be as nostalgic? (to rephrase the well-known Shakespearean quote).

Having Portuguese as a first language, the thought came to mind after reading the article "Saudade: Happy Melancholy, Nostalgia for What Is Absent", published in Erraticus, the "online publication focused on human flourishing”, available at https://erraticus.co/.../saudade-happy-melancholy-nostalgia/

Similar statements reflecting the unique nature of specific words can be found in many other languages. Interesting to note, however, that the article suggests an evolutionary 'Made-in-Brazil' variant to the original Galician-Portuguese term (Saudade). 

Without getting into deep philological discussions, I submit that every language predominantly reflects long-lasting cultural and historical worldviews retained from the past. On the other hand, as on-going cultural material, words acquire new nuances induced by generational or cultural evolution (the Brazilian case).

In the Portuguese ‘gestalt’, past memory and faith stands above visions of the future. Such ‘historical relapse’ in reading history backwards rather than forwards may explain why the ‘Sebastianism’ myth survived in the popular mind until recently: young King Sebastian, who died in Morocco in 1578 trying to reconquer lost Portuguese territories ‘would return one day on a misty morning’  [1]... Another example, particularly pertaining to the political discourse, highlights two distinct visions inspiring the (strategic, forward-looking) English ‘Commonwealth’ in contrast to a (romantic, backward-looking) Portuguese ‘Portugality’.

Schopenhauer’s reflections (“On language and words”[2]) claims that […]“An exact equivalent for every word of a language cannot be found in every other. Therefore, all concepts characterized by the words of one language are not exactly the same as those expressed by the other […]; sometimes in one language the word for a concept is missing […] or for some concepts a word can be found in only one language, which then passes over to the others […]. Sometimes too a foreign language expresses a concept with a nuance that our own does not give it […highlighting] the fact that “Poems cannot be translated but merely recomposed” (p.509).  

Pluralism notwithstanding, in an ever-more globalized world, we are increasingly using 'borrowed' words to make up for non-existing ones in our own language, often being pushed into translating one language into another. Will cultural identities be eroded? Since the English language has clearly gone much beyond what Latin once represented for the Western world, will this promote poorer idiom and cultural 'biodiversity’?

More importantly, in such interconnected universes of both specific and universal realities , how will humanity cope with a broader sense of  'collective consciousness' [3]? Reflections to be taken up in future blogs, particularly realising that a sense of longing, loneliness and loss (saudade) permeates much of what my own website 'Pages' stand for ...

[1] R.Zenith, ”Pessoa: a biography”, Liveright Publishing, 2021: 422-24.

[2] A.Schopenhauer, 'Parerga and Paralipomena, Short Philosophical Essays', vol.2: 506-519, CUP, 2017.

[3] https://noetic.org/blog/is-there-evidence-universal-consciousness/

Photo: Mana Pools, Zimbabwe, 2018 (João de Morais)