Abstract
Saudade — to express this feeling, so befitting of the Portuguese, who are by nature sensitive and affectionate — there is no other language nor many words which could define it so well.
… we have saudade to see the land where we were born, or where we grew up, for somewhere we once lived, or for times of prosperity.… it is the memory of something, coupled with the desire for it.1
— Duarte Nunes de Leão, 1606
As early as the beginning of the seventeenth century, historian Nunes de Leão was able to identify some of the features of saudade that have remained constant: firstly, that it is a unique word which describes a unique state (of Portugueseness itself); and secondly, that it is linked to the common Portuguese experience of journeying and migration. In the centuries since, saudade has repeatedly been invoked in the service of defining Portuguese identity and memory as well as articulating a desire for belonging and for a homeland, be it territorial or spiritual.
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Notes
Duarte Nunes de Leão, ‘Origem da Língua Portuguesa’ [1606], 4th ed., (ed.) J. P. Machado, Lisbon, 1945, 309, in Dalila L. Pereira da Costa & Pinharanda Gomes (eds) (1976) Introdução à Saudade: Antologia Teórica e Aproximação Crítica (Porto: Lello & Irmão), 7. [Saudade — este afecto como é proprio dos Portugueses que naturalmente são maviosos, e afeiçoados não ha língua em que da mesma maneira se possa explicar, nem ainda per muitas palavras que se declare bem.… temos saudade de ver a Terra em que nascemos, ou em que nos criámos, ou em que nos vimos em algum posto, ou prosperidade.… é lembrança de alguma cousa com desejo dela.]
It has been proposed that saudade developed out of the Latin solitatem (solitude), from which the Spanish word soledad also derives, or from the Latin salutate (health), or from the Arabic saudá — meaning black bile — and is therefore related to humoral medicine. For an anthology of a diverse range of theories see: Costa and Gomes (eds), Introdução à Saudade, 7–13. See also Estela Vieira (2007) ‘“Saudade” and “Soledad”: Fernando Pessoa and António Machado on Nostalgia and Loneliness’, Romance Notes, vol. 48 (1), 127.
Martin Heidegger (1996) Being and Time (Sein und Zeit), trans. J. Stambaugh (New York: State University of New York Press) [1927], 174–5 (part 1, chap. 6).
Pascoaes, ‘Justiça social. Os lavradores caseiros’ [1910], in Gomes (ed.), Saudade e Saudosismo, 3.
Maria das Graças Moreira de Sá (1992) Estética da Saudade em Teixeira de Pascoaes (Lisbon: ICLP [Instituto de Cultura e Língua Portuguesa]), 86.
On the example of Britain, see Paul Gilroy (2005) Postcolonial Melancholia (New York: Columbia University Press), 90. Similar arguments have been made about post-Soviet Russia: Serguei Alex.
Oushakine (2009) The Patriotism of Despair: Nation, War, and Loss in Russia (Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press).
Peter Fritzsche (2004) Stranded in the Present: Modern Time and the Melancholy of History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), 5–6. In a similar vein, Svetlana Boym comments that ‘Nostalgic manifestations are side effects of the teleology of progress.’ (Future of Nostalgia, 10.)
On progress and loss of hope, see also Wendy Brown (2001) Politics Out of History (Princeton: Princeton University Press), 7.
Harold Mah links German ‘cultural dislocation’ following the disillusioning chaos of its national identity to the rise of Marx’s culture-free proletariat: Mah (2003) Enlightenment Phantasies: Cultural Identity in France and Germany, 1750–1914 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press), 4.
See, for example, Eduardo Lourenço (1982) O Labirinto da Saudade: Psicanálise Mítica do Destino Português, 2nd ed. (Lisbon: Publicações Dom Quixote) [1978]; (1999) Portugal como Destino seguido de Mitologia da Saudade, Lisbon, Gradiva.
Maria Teresa de Noronha (2007) A Saudade: contribuições fenomenológicas, lógicas e ontológicas (Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional-Casa da Moeda), 23.
António Dias de Magalhães (1955) ‘Da História à Metafísica da Saudade’, Cidade Nova, Sept. 1955, in A. Botelho and A. Braz Teixeira (eds) (1986) Filosofia da Saudade (Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional-Casa da Moeda), 266, quoted in Sá, Estética da Saudade, 91. [A saudade é o sentimento da experiência espiritual da contingência.]
The first significant study of the twentieth century was produced by the Carolina Michaëlis de Vasconcellos, the only prominent female member of the Renascença Portuguesa, in 1922: Vasconcellos (1922) A Saudade Portuguesa: Divagações filológicas e literar-históricas em volta de Inês de Castro e do cantar velho ‘Saudade minha — ¿Quando te veria?’, 2nd ed. (Porto: Renascença Portuguesa). Her concise and much cited work not only examines saudade’s rise apropos the Discoveries (during the sixteenth century, in particular), but is also devoted to the matter of its disputed etymology.
Introdução à Saudade (1976) offers a valuable anthology of definitions and critical representations, adding phenomenological interpretations to the standard philologies: D. L. Pereira da Costa & P. Gomes (eds) (1976) Introdução à Saudade (Antologia teórica e aproximação crítica) (Porto: Lello & Irmão). A more recent addition is Noronha (2007) A Saudade.
The word fado means ‘fate’. Michael Colvin (2008) The Reconstruction of Lisbon: Severa’s Legacy and the Fado’s Rewriting of Urban History (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press), 14. The Estado Novo lasted from 1933–74. Saudade is also a common theme in the music and popular culture in Brazil and — as sodade — in morna, the music of the former Portuguese colony of Cape Verde.
Lila Ellen Gray (2007) “Memories of Empire, Mythologies of the Soul: Fado Performance and the Shaping of Saudade”, Ethnomusicology, vol. 51 (1), 109.
Jaime Cortesão (1951) ‘No 40° aniversário da Renascença Portuguesa’, Primo de Janeiro, vol. 28 (7), quoted in Fernando Farelo Lopes (1983) ‘António Sérgio na ‘Renascença Portuguesa,’ Revista de História das Ideias, vol. 5 (1), 408.
Abdoolkarim Vakil (1995) ‘Representations of the ‘“Discoveries”’ and the Imaginary of the Nation in Portuguese Integralism’, Portuguese Studies, vol. 11, 136.
Sérgio, ‘Epístolas aos Saudosistas’, October 1913, in ‘A polémica’, in Gomes (ed.), Saudade e Saudosismo, 99. [Dizem que o saudosismo está de acordo corn o espírito contemporâneo. Essa pretensão, como todas as do saudosismo, é precisamente o contrário da verdade. Não poderia ser o desacordo mais perfeito, nem o absurdo mais sensível.]
Leah Greenfeld (1993) Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), 12–15 and passim. The original concept of ressentiment is Friedrich Nietzsche’s.
Eduardo Lourenço is arguably the foremost theorist of Portuguese identity; his O Labirinto da Saudade is one of the seminal works on the topic. See also: Francisco da Cunha Leão (1960) O Enigma Português (Lisbon: Guimarâes);
João Medina (2006) Portuguesismo(s): (acerca da identidade nacional) (Lisbon: Centro de Histôria da Universidade de Lisboa); Boaventura de Sousa Santos follows the post-1974 trend of focusing on political and socioeconomic aspects of Portuguese identity over the mythic. See, for example, Pela mão de Alice: o social e o polìtico na pós-modernidade (1996) and Portugal: ensaio contra a autoflagelação (2011).
Eduardo Lourenço (2002) ‘Portugal and Its Destiny’, in C. Veloso (ed.) Chaos and Splendor and Other Essays (Dartmouth: University of Massachusetts), esp. 111.
Luís Vaz de Camões (1952) The Lusiads, trans. W. C. Atkinson (Harmondsworth: Penguin) [1572]. Os Lusiadas means ‘The sons of Lusus’ (i.e., the Portuguese).
Ronald W. Sousa (1981) The Rediscoverers: Major Writers in the Portuguese Literature of National Regeneration (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press), 2.
Luís de Sousa Rebelo (1997) ‘Identidade nacional: As retóricas do seu discurso’, in (eds) Fernando Cristóvão, Maria de Lourdes Ferraz, Alberto Carvalho, Nacionalismo e regionalismo nas literaturas lusófonas (Lisbon: Cosmos), 22.
José Manuel Sobral (2008) ‘Race and Space in Interpretations of Portugal: The North-South Division and Representations of Portuguese National Identity in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries’, in Sharon R. Roseman and Shawn S. Parkhurst (eds), Recasting Culture and Space in Iberian Contexts (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press), 213.
Tiago Saraiva (2007) ‘Inventing the Technological Nation: the Example of Portugal (1851–1898),’ History and Technology, vol. 23 (3), 264.
Philipp Blom (2008) The Vertigo Years: Europe 1900–1914 (New York: Basic Books), 3, 17.
Jorge Borges de Macedo (1983) ‘Significado e evolução das polémicas de António Sérgio’, Revista de História das Ideias, vol. 5 (1), 475.
Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2002) ‘Between Prospero and Caliban: Colonialism, Postcolonialism, and Inter-identity’, Luso-Brazilian Review, vol 39 (2), 9.
Ibid., passim, and Kathleen C. Schwartzman (1989) The Social Origins of Democratic Collapse: The First Portuguese Republic in the Global Economy (Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas) 77. Appendix A of the same book (193–6) offers a useful guide to ‘Defining the semiperiphery’.
Pascoaes, ‘A fisionomia das palavras’ [1911], in Gomes (ed.) Saudade e Saudosismo.
Malcolm Jack (2007) Lisbon, City of the Sea: A History (New York: I. B. Tauris), 153–4. Portugal’s national anthem, ‘A Portuguesa’, was composed in the wake of the Ultimatum.
José I. Suárez (1991) ‘Portugal’s Saudosismo Movement: An Esthetics of Sebastianism’, Luso-Brazilian Review. vol. 28 (1), 135.
Pascoaes, ‘O saudosismo e a “renascença”’, [1912], in Gomes (ed.) Saudade e Saudosismo, 60.
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© 2014 Kyra Giorgi
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Giorgi, K. (2014). Proudly Alone?. In: Emotions, Language and Identity on the Margins of Europe. Palgrave Studies in the History of Emotions. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137403483_3
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