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The Meaning of Saudade

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The Meaning of Saudade xx xxxxxxPsyche THAT SWEET SENSE OF SADNESS For journalist Olivia I recently visited the rst place I The air always smelled of coriander. upmarket. Funky little coffee But when the client later took me rarely thought about that street in had lived in London, UK. It’s a This developed into a more spots now occupy the spaces where on a tour to admire the views from the years after I left. But when I Gagan, returning to neighborhood called Whitechapel, full-bodied scent of curry as you the hole-in-the-wall newsagents and the top of the building, I was went back, I was ooded with the neighborhood in in the East End of the city. It’s home approached Brick Lane to the right, Indian candy shops used to be. New overcome with a wave of a very feeling. What was it all about? It London, UK, where to a large Bengali community, and a narrow street famous for almost and wildly expensive apartment speci c emotion. Looking down at was such a strong emotion—a very has a busy road with a major every building being a curry house. blocks have replaced dusty, dirty the street, separated from it by a speci c ache—that I felt sure other she’d once lived and hospital, subway station, and I’d pass the same newspaper stand Victorian warehouses. thick sheet of glass, tears suddenly people must have felt it, too. It worked left her with hundreds of shops and restaurants. every day, and the headlines would I noticed these things while started to well up in my eyes. It felt couldn’t only be me. I tried to feelings of nostalgia Booming and brash, this street brie y ash past my eyes as I wobbling on a chair outside a like getting hit with an intoxicating explain it to a friend who had spent teems with life 24/7. walked. Seasons went by: I walked coffee stand, trying to discreetly memory—with a deep aftertaste of time there too back then, and was and longing. The Back when I lived there, I used in leaves, I walked in snow and, as wrestle a pair of heels onto my feet. sadness. It was a strange feeling. A met with a laugh. “It’s just nostalgia!” Portuguese have to get up at 4:50 a.m. every day. summer arrived, I walked in slowly I didn’t have much time to think longing for something, a place, a he said. “Looking at the past with a word for it: Half-asleep, I’d slip on my sneakers brightening morning light. about all these transformations: I time, along with the strong sense rose-tinted glasses.” And yet, none to walk one-and-a-half miles (just was in a rush to get to a meeting. that what I was missing had gone, of his explanations quite rang true. ‘saudade’. under two-and-a-half kilometers) GLASS TOWER I had to impress a new potential that I couldn’t go back. Everything I couldn’t nd a name for the down this road to open the café When I returned this year, nearly a client who worked on the top oor had changed. emotion, until I remembered a word where I worked as a waitress. decade had passed. It had changed of a gleaming glass tower that I’d heard once somewhere: Whitechapel High Street has a street a great deal: the people and the didn’t even exist when I had lived in ROSE-TINTED GLASSES saudade. It’s a Portuguese word market, and at dawn, I’d weave buses still rolled endlessly down the the neighborhood, and I forgot my It was such a distinct, bittersweet that doesn’t have a direct through traders setting up their street, but the area had become sense of nostalgia as soon as I sensation that I kept thinking about equivalent in other languages. stands of sh and clothes and herbs. sleeker, more gentri ed, more walked into this fancy of ce. it in the days that followed. I had Try entering the word into > _ 49 ‘SAUDADE ALSO HAS A POSITIVE MEANING—OF GRATITUDE FOR HAVING HAD THE EXPERIENCE YOU NOW REMEMBER’ Google Translate and it offers back by many different things. The key Portuguese-speaking countries? attempt to describe it is: “We all someone or something who has ON THE SCREEN the word ‘missing’. Saudade, as I thing is, it’s usually something you I message a friend, Rosie, who experience within us what the been or who still is very important to found out, is notoriously dif cult to can’t touch or access again. spent a year living in Rio de Janeiro, Portuguese call ‘saudade’, an them, but is no longer in their life. It In the 2012 Brazilian translate. It means ‘nostalgia’, And while the feeling is strongly Brazil, to ask what the word means inexplicable longing, an unnamed doesn’t always refer to someone movie ‘Elena’, the ‘longing’, ‘a reminder of a person or associated with melancholy, it to her, and if the spirit of saudade and enigmatic yearning of the soul, who has died. It can refer to various eponymous main a place that is missing or cannot be also has a positive meaning—of really does lter into everyday life in and it is this feeling that lives in the kinds of loss, too: a lost romantic character leaves reached again’. Here’s a better gratitude for having had the the country. ‘Saudade is a huge part realms of imagination and inspiration, relationship or a lost place.” I ask behind the military de nition, from the Portuguese experience you now remember. A of Brazilian culture,’ she writes back. and is the breeding ground for the her why it is such a potent emotion. dictatorship and her dictionary Houaiss: Sentimento sweet, complicated kind of sadness. ‘It must be one of the hardest words sad song, for the love song”. “It’s a feeling that you have when little sister, Petra, mais ou menos melancólico de to translate in the world.’ She now moving around a world where you’re in Brazil, and goes incompletude, ligado pela memória A PAINFUL TUG lives back in Europe, but often talks LOST LOVE noticing the absence of someone or to New York, US, to a situações de privação da Saudade is described as the about how happy her time in Rio Ah, love. That might have something something that you loved,” she says. pursue her dream of presença de alguém ou de algo, de national spirit of Portugal and was, and how much she identi ed to do with it, too. I can’t in all “You’re living in the world with the becoming an actress. afastamento de um lugar ou de uma Brazil, and has inspired countless with the way of life. “I feel saudade honesty say I loved, in the romantic presence of absence. I think that Twenty years later, coisa, ou à ausência de certas songs, artists and books. It’s the for Brazil every day,” she says. sense of the word, that period in my can be very evocative. It’s a big Petra, who was born experiências e determinados emotion at the heart of the This started me thinking about early twenties in Whitechapel. I was emotion to feel.” when Elena was prazeres já vividos... Portuguese tradition of fado, a how important and formative places living in a cold, shoddy apartment, I thirteen, goes to New Translated, this means something melancholic, guitar-based style of can be to us, whether we realize it was broke and I was desperate for a THAT YOUNG GIRL York in search of her like: ‘A more or less melancholy music. Portuguese singer and or not at the time. Feeling a painful better job. I had little idea what I was My time in Whitechapel only lasted sister. All she has feeling of incompleteness, linked by actress Amália Rodrigues, who was tug when you think of a house, doing and where I was going. But on eighteen months or so. I eventually to go on are a few memory to situations of deprivation known as the ‘Queen of Fado’, is street or town where you used to the other hand, I was also around found another job and went to live in bits of film footage, of the presence of someone or strongly associated with saudade. live is a very saudade emotion. In friends; I fell in love for the rst another part of town. I moved on. But newspaper cuttings, something, the removal of a place So well-loved was Rodrigues for fact, it is possibly part of the origin time during that period and the the images, sounds and experiences a diary and letters. or a thing, or the absence of certain her songs, that three days’ of of the word. Some academics opportunities I had to shape my life of that place got led away in my Nevertheless, she experiences and pleasures already national mourning were declared in argue the word emerged to felt endless. Maybe these things memory, in a box labeled: ‘You, aged hopes to find Elena. lived’. See? It’s a hard emotion to Portugal and she was given a state describe the longing experienced were what prompted those tears to 22’. And when that box was opened, But things don’t describe. But once you’ve felt it, funeral when she died in 1999. by those left behind by Portuguese spring up when I returned years just for a second, in the present, go quite as she you know what it means.
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