Ondas de Vida

Her basket full of fish, she carries them
sometimes atop her head
walking from the shore
sea salt upon her lips
singing to herself hushed tones, of days gone by

Below the rooftops
she hears it, the flow
the rush of wind, carrying the sound of clogs
echoing from the cobblestone street
and she sees it,

A janela de sua casa
the window of her home
that place belonging to her soul, where she sits
watching the life of her time
listening to guitars into the night
praying for that caravel
its safe return,

Knowing, for all time
she will ever belong
in these alley's with no name
the pathways to her being
that reside upon horizons yet to be loved
without pain, with you
Lisboa Antigua
Through your hand she does exist,
Aurora
always, upon the shore Aurora
always, at the window
Aurora
always, pulled
by the waves, of saudade

© Dawn Michelle, All rights reserved

Author notes

varinas: for lack of better English words, a varina is a lady fish vendor, a way of life in Lisbon Portugal

Saudade is a Portuguese word that appears here and there in English writings. Usually the writer will give brief explanation, something along the lines of "The Portuguese word for the presence of absence'" It is often be touted as 'untranslatable'. The result is that saudade is seen as a type of bittersweet super-nostalgia, bigger and better than anything that the English speaking world can truly understand. How poetic!

And here's the translation. No translation is 100 percent indisputable, but in this case, it's a pretty straightforward and bland task.

Saudade feminine noun. A memory sad, but sweet, of persons or things that are distant or lost, accompanied by the desire to see or have them again; To feel grief over the absence of a person whom you love; nostalgia; (Bot.) The common name of various plants of the family Dipsacaceae (the teasels), and their flowers; (in the plural; saudades) Affectionate remembrances of those who have died; (in the plural; saudades) may be used as a greeting.

Well, that sucked the romance right out, didn't it? But as you might expect, the themes of missing those you love and homesickness are a major component of poetry and songs, including the famous Portuguese fado. When English speakers have tried to translate these songs they came upon the problem that the writer/singer is filling the piece with strong emotion and, hopefully, beauty. In English the phrases "I have longing", "I am with longing" sound awkward and wrong, with a distinct lack of beauty. If you simply replaced saudade with the word 'nostalgia' you would usually have a good translation, but it would sound clumsy. Faced with the difficulty of translating a word that just doesn't fit grammatically into English, the English-speaking world decided to give up. Just use the Portuguese word that fills the grammatical position so well, and pretend that we couldn't translate it if we tried.

Longing, nostalgia, and missing someone who is not there are all well developed ideas in English, and there's no need to pretend that saudade is anything that we don't speak about in our everyday lives. We tend to emphasize the feeling as a verb (I long for you, I miss you), and avoid using it as a noun (I have longing, I feel nostalgia for you). But the idea is the same.

Having said all that, there is the idea of Saudosismo, an artistic and philosophical idea that appears in the early 1900s. This is a highly poignant nostalgia for the way things used to be. The longing for the old folkways, the idealization of the life that once was, the desire to escape the modern world and live as the noble Portuguese one did.

This movement has added an extra dimension to the word saudade. Sometimes it is used in the context of glorifying lost ways of life, reaffirming the Portuguese cultural identity, and bringing the nostalgia for Portuguese history to an almost religious plane. But this is not really a sense that English speakers really have any reason to use. The English mythology of saudade doesn't really have any Portuguese counterpart.