Saudade (singular) or saudades (plural) (pronounced [sɐ.uˈdaðɨ] or [sawˈdaðɨ] in European Portuguese,[1] [sa.uˈdad(ʒ)ɪ] or [sawˈdad(ʒ)ɪ] in Brazilian Portuguese[2] and [sawˈdade] in Galician) is a Portuguese and Galician word difficult to translate adequately, which describes a deep emotional state of nostalgic longing for something or someone that one was fond of and which is lost. It often carries a fatalist tone and a repressed knowledge that the object of longing might really never return.
Saudade has been described as a "vague and constant desire for something that does not and probably cannot exist ... a turning towards the past or towards the future".[3] A stronger form of saudade may be felt towards people and things whose whereabouts are unknown, such as a lost lover, or a family member who has gone missing. It may also be translated as a deep longing or yearning for something which does not exist or is unattainable.
Saudade was once described as "the love that remains" or "the love that stays" after someone is gone. Saudade is the recollection of feelings, experiences, places or events that once brought excitement, pleasure, well-being, which now triggers the senses and makes one live again. It can be described as an emptiness, like someone ( e.g., one's children, parents, sibling, grandparents, friends) or something (e.g., places, pets, things one used to do in childhood, or other activities performed in the past) that should be there in a particular moment is missing, and the individual feels this absence. In Portuguese, 'tenho saudades tuas', translated as 'I have saudades for you' means 'I miss you', but carries a much stronger tone. In fact, one can have 'saudades' of someone with which one is, but have some feeling of loss towards the past or the future.
In Brazil, the day of saudade is officially celebrated on January 30.
Definition
Saudade (or Saudades) is defined as "a somewhat melancholic feeling of incompleteness. It is related to think back situations of privation due to the absence of someone or something, to move away from a place or thing, or to the absence of a set of particular and desirable experiencies and pleasures once lived"
Similar words in other languages
There are other words in other languages which can have similar meaning. Saudade relates to the
Italian nostalgia (
melancolia in
Portuguese), in which one feels an interior satisfaction because it is impossible to find something, but one never stops thinking that one is searching for it. It is an incompleteness that one unconsciously wants to never completely resolve. Saudade relates to the
French regret, in which one feels a hard sentiment, meaning hardful, but in nostalgic sense. Saudade relates to the
Spanish extrañar, in which one feels a missing part of oneself, which can never be completely filled by the thing you cannot have or get back. The word can also be translated by the Spanish expression "echar de menos", which would be roughly an equivalent to the Portuguese "ter saudades", missing something or someone. The Greek word that comes close to translating saudade is νοσταλγία (
nostalgia). Nostalgia also appears in the Portuguese language as in the many of other languages with a Indo-European origin, bearing the same meaning of the Greek word "νοσταλγία". There is yet another word that, like 'saudade', has no immediate translation in English: λαχτάρα (
lakhtara). This word encompasses sadness, longing and hope, as does the term saudade.
In
Albanian, a direct translation of saudade is the word
mall, which encompasses feelings of passionate longing, sadness, and at the same time an undefined laughter from the same source. Other variations which give different nuances to this word are:
pëmallim,
përmallje, etc.
In the Torlak dialect of Bulgarian, spoken today in the easternmost part of Serbia and the remote southern mountains of Kosovo, there is an expression which corresponds more closely to the Japanese and Greek examples below, but can be compared to
saudade in the broader sense of longing for the past. It is
жал за младос(т) /
žal za mlados(t) i.e., "yearning for one's youth." (Since the dialect has not been standardised as a written language it has various forms.) The term and the concept have been popularised in standard Serbian through short prose and plays by
Vranje born
fin-de-siècle writer Borisav Stanković.
One translation of "saudade" into Dutch is
weemoed; a fuzzy form of nostalgia. In the Romanian language, the word
dor bears a close meaning to "saudade". It can also stand for "love" or "desire" having a derivation in the noun
dorinţă and the verb
dori, both of them being translated usually by "wish" and "to wish". However, although the word
dor has a complex meaning, it still does not encompass the full meaning of "saudade".
Dor is derived from the Latin
dolus ("pain"), the same root as the Portuguese word
dor, also meaning "pain". In Welsh,
Saudade is said to be the only exact equivalent of the Welsh
hiraeth and the Cornish
hireth.
[9] Esperanto borrows the word directly, changing the spelling to accommodate
Esperanto grammar, as
saŭdado.
[10]
In English, the verb "To Pine". To Pine for somebody, something or someplace that you miss deeply, to wish you could be there or have it again. A nostalgic yearning for something which may no longer exist, melancholic, fatalist overtone that the object of longing may never return.
The
Finnish language has a word whose meaning corresponds very closely with
saudade:
kaiho.
Kaiho means a state of involuntary solitude in which the subject feels incompleteness and yearns for something unattainable or extremely difficult and tedious to attain. Ironically, the sentiment of
kaiho is central to the
Finnish tango, in stark contrast to the
Argentine tango, which is predominantly sensuous.
Kaiho has religious connotations in Finland as well, since the large Lutheran sect called the
Awakening (Finnish
herännäiset, or
körttiläiset more familiarly) consider central to their faith a certain
kaiho towards
Zion, as expressed in their central book
Siionin Virret (Hymns of Zion). However,
saudade does not involve tediousness. Rather, the feeling of
saudade accentuates itself: the more one thinks about the loved person or object, the more one feels
saudade. The feeling can even be creative, as one strives to fill in what is missing with something else or to recover it altogether.
In Korean,
keurium (그리움) is probably closest to
saudade. It reflects a yearning for anything that has left a deep impression in the heart - a memory, a place, a person, etc. In Japan,
saudade expresses a concept similar to the Japanese word
natsukashii. Although commonly translated as "dear, beloved, or sweet," in modern conversational Japanese
natsukashii can be used to express a longing for the past. It connotes both happiness for the fondness of that memory and goodness of that time, as well as sadness that it is no longer. It is an adjective for which there is no quite fitting English translation. It can also mean "sentimental," and is a wistful emotion. The character used to write natsukashii can also be read as futokoro 懐 [ふところ] and means "bosom," referring to the depth and intensity of this emotion that can even be experienced as a physical feeling or pang in one's chest~ a broken heart, or a heart feeling moved.
In Armenian, "Saudade" is represented by "կարոտ" (karot) that describes the deep feeling of missing of something or somebody.
The Arabic synonym for Saudade is وجد (Wajd), a state of transparent sadness caused by the memory of a loved one who is not near, it's widely used in ancient Arabic poetry to describe the state of the lover's heart as he or she remembers the long gone love. It's a mixed emotion of sadness for the loss, and happiness for having had loved that person. In Turkish, the feeling of saudade is somewhat similar to
hüzün. Its position in Turkey is similar to saudade in Portugal in that it's a melancholic feeling popular in art and culture following the fall of a great empire. However hüzün is closer to melancholy and depression in that it's associated with a sense of failure in life and lack of initiative.
In
Ithkuil, the root
x-ḑ is equivalent to saudade.
That's interesting. (In Spanish, it's fiero. Is it not similar to that in Portuguese?)
I'm sure we have a word, but I don't know what it is. 
