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Portuguese people think that they are the only ones in the world to have the concept of “saudade“.
«It is impossible to translate it in other languages», they always state.
But is this true?
It took me one year to understand what “saudade” is and why it has not the same meaning as “nostalgia”.
That’s what I discovered.

NOSTALGIA

The word “nostalgia” comes from two greek words:

  • Nóstos, meaning “coming back home”
  • Álgos, meaning “pain”

Basically, “nostalgia” is homesickness. The word was created in 1688 by Johannes Hofel who described as “nostalgia” or “mal du pays” the “homesickness” for the condition also known as “mal du Suisse”, “Swiss illness” or Schweizerheimweh (“Swiss homesickness”), because of its frequent occurrence in Swiss mercenaries, who were pining for their native mountain landscapes in the plains of lowlands of France or Italy. Symptoms included fainting, high fever, indigestion, stomach pain and death. Military physicians hypothesized that the malady was due to damage to the victims’ brain cells and ear drums by the constant clanging of cowbells in the pastures of Switzerland.

The feeling of nostalgia is related to missing who we were at a certain moment, in a certain place. In fact, whenever we feel sad because we miss something or someone and we say we are feeling “nostalgia”, what we miss is not the person or the things we are thinking about. What we actually miss is ourselves: when feeling nostalgia, we miss our identity, who we were by that time.

Generally, trying to satisfy the feeling of nostalgia is very disappointing.
When I was attending University for my Bachelor’s degree, my Professor of Psychology, Maria Rita Serio, said it’s better not trying to satisfy the feeling of nostalgia. She made an example: when we miss a night spent together with our partner in a very romantic place with an amazing landscape, it’s better not to plan to visit that place anymore with the intent of “repeating the experience”, since the experience we once had cannot be repeated. It will never be the same as the fist time, for a lot of reasons: time has passed, the place itself could be different, we would not be surrounded by the same persons, we could be different than in the past.
When we do such things, what we want to repeat is not the experience itself, but the way we were feeling by that time, who we were together as a couple by the time we were happy. If there are problems in a relationship, trying to live again the moments of the past when the partners were happy and in love could be extremely disappointing.

SAUDADE

The word “saudade” comes from two latin words:

  • Solitudo, meaning “loneliness”
  • Salutare, meaning “to say goodbye”

Saudade means “feeling lonely after a farewell“.
This word is used in Portuguese and Galician and it’s described as the love that remains after someone is gone. It has an intrinsic meaning of hope for the future. It’s a somewhat melancholic feeling of incompleteness.
The feeling of “saudade” is related to:

  • thinking back on situations of privation due to the absence of someone or something,
  • moving away from a place,
  • the absence of a set of particular and desirable experiences and pleasures once lived.

When we feel “saudade”, we are not missing the person we were in the past, nor the way we felt at a certain moment of our life, in a certain city or while loving a certain person.
When we feel “saudade”, we miss the person we once loved and then lost, because we still feel love for that person.
When we feel “saudade”, we miss the experiences lived at a certain moment of our life because we still feel love for the things we were doing (i.e. football’s our biggest passion and we used to play it at a professional level but now we can’t play football anymore because of an injury. Some months after the injury, when we recover, we miss playing football because we loved doing it and we are sad at the idea we will never play football anymore. This is saudade).

Aubrey Fitz Gerald Bell described the feeling of “saudade” in his book “In Portugal” (1912) as it follows:

The famous saudade of the Portuguese is a vague and constant desire for something that does not and probably cannot exist, for something other than the present, a turning towards the past or towards the future; not an active discontent or poignant sadness but an indolent dreaming wistfulness.

Anyway, the concept of “saudade” exists in other languages and not only in Portuguese.
For example, it could be translate in:

  • Romanian: “dor”;
  • Albanian: “mall”;
  • Turkish: “hüzün”;
  • Bosnian: “sevdah”;
  • Arabic: “wajd”;
  • Welsh: “hiraeth”;
  • Finnish: “kaiho”;
  • Japanese: “natsukashii”;
  • Hebrew: “ergah”.

Sources:
– Nostalgia (EN): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nostalgia
– Saudade (PT): http://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saudade
– Saudade (EN): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saudade
– Why do we feel nostalgia? By Vsauce: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=coGfGmOeLjE