The saudade is a Portuguese word meaning a feeling of emptiness generated by the distance installed with a loved one. It is therefore a feeling of lack, of a place or a person, of an era. A word borrowed from Portuguese culture, it is now widely used in French, although it cannot be translated, as the emotion it expresses is so complex.

Etymologiquement, nostalgia comes from latin discontinued, and signifies a complex emotion mixing at the same time melancholy, nostalgia and hope. The first appearance of this word would date from around 1200, in ballads of Portuguese troubadours. Deeply rooted in Portuguese culture, it is the basis of many myths such as that of Dom Sebastiao.

This word evokes a mixture of sweet and bitter emotions, where we remember moments spent, often with a loved one, whom we know will be difficult to see happen again. But hope persists.

There is no French equivalent word to translate the word “saudade” from Portuguese, and for good reason: it is difficult to find a word that encompasses both a joyful memory and a suffering linked to dissatisfaction, regrets, while mingling with it an impossible hope. It is a word evoking a mysterious mixture of contradictory emotions in memory of the past, the origin of which could not be determined by linguists.

A Portuguese writer, Manuel de Melo, qualified the saudade with this phrase: “Bem que se padece y mal que se disfruta”; meaning “a good inflicted and an evil enjoyed”, which sums up the meaning of the single word saudade.

However, this word could have so many nuances and meanings that several writers or poets have given their own idea of ​​what saudade is. For example, Fernando Pessoa, famous Portuguese writer, defined it as “the poetry of fado”. However, all agree to see in this word an extreme nostalgia, a little like the term “spleen”, made famous by Baudelaire.

Fado is a Portuguese style of music, the importance and popularity of which in Portugal is fundamental. In the tradition, it is a woman who sings, accompanied by a twelve-string guitar, played by two men. It is through this musical style that saudade was most often expressed, in the texts of poets and singers. In these musical texts, one could evoke nostalgia for the past, missing people, lost love, the human condition and changing feelings over time. Singing these feelings allows listeners to actually understand the ambiguous meaning of saudade. It is the means of expression that is linked to this term, by its Portuguese cultural history. Although this word is profoundly Portuguese and impossible to translate, it therefore remains accessible to everyone, able to read with the heart the emotions expressed by a fado singer, such as Amalia Rodrigues, a well-known singer and having carried by her voice. full of emotions fado all over the world, and thus the knowledge of saudade.

Many linguists, philosophers, philologists and writers have tried in books and novels to qualify the saudade. Adelino Braz, in The untranslatable in question: the study of saudade, qualifies this word as “tension between opposites”: on the one hand the feeling of a lack, on the other hand the hope and the desire to rediscover. what we lack.

The Portuguese language uses the expression “to have saudades”, the object of which can be a loved one, a place, a state like childhood.

“I have a past,” Pessoa emphasizes in his correspondence, “only saudades of missing persons, whom I loved; it is not the saudade of the time in which I loved them, but the very saudade of these people ”.

According to Inês Oseki-Dépré in her book La Saudade, the Portuguese origin of nostalgia would be associated with the first conquests in Africa. It is by means of this word nostalgia that the settlers expressed their feelings towards the homeland from Madeira, Alcazarquivir, Arcila, Tangier, Cape Verde and The Azores.

Finally, this feeling of saudade brings into play an equally ambivalent relationship, both in the past and in the present. We are happy to be present in the past, and we are sad to have passed in the present.

Finally, the saudade is an absolute nostalgia, a mixture of emotions resonating in different space-times of our mind, where love is past, but still present.