Saudade Meaning: The Myth of the Untranslatable Word

The first time someone greeted me with Que saudade!, I had seen her nine days earlier. We had shared a long table at a churrasco, and now she was crossing the rodoviária in Belo Horizonte with her arms open, as if I'd come back from a year at sea.

By then I had read on posters, mugs and a dozen listicles that saudade was the most beautiful word in Portuguese: a feeling so particular to the Portuguese soul that no other language could name it. And she had just used it to mean "it's so good to see you, I've missed you." That didn't sound untranslatable. It sounded like a normal Tuesday.

Saudade is a real, much-loved word, and Brazilians use it constantly. The claim that it has no translation, though, is a story with authors, dates and a long commercial afterlife. Let's trace it, compare saudade with its neighbours in other languages, and then put saudade in Brazilian Portuguese to work.

What Does Saudade Mean?

Saudade is the feeling of missing someone or something you love, usually mixed with warm memories of it. The object can be a person, a place, a food, a period of your life or a time that won't come back. It has a sweet edge as well as a sad one, because what you miss was good.

In most of Brazil it sounds like sow-DAH-jee, with sow rhyming with "now." The d before a final e softens into a "j" sound, as in cidade and verdade. In Portugal you'll hear something closer to sow-DAHD, with the final vowel almost swallowed. Our European vs Brazilian Portuguese guide explains why those endings drift apart.

When learners ask about saudade in Brazilian Portuguese, they usually want one English word. The usual candidates are to miss, longing, yearning, homesickness and nostalgia. Which one fits depends on the sentence, the way it does for most words you'll ever translate.

Where the "Untranslatable" Myth Came From

The idea is much older than the posters. It runs through almost six centuries of Portuguese writing, and each period added its own layer:

• Around 1438, a king's essay. Dom Duarte, king of Portugal, wrote about suydade, an older spelling of the word, in his moral treatise Leal Conselheiro. He separated it from plain sadness and grief, and remarked that neither Latin nor any other language he knew had so fitting a word. This is where the claim begins, and it rests on the handful of languages one fifteenth-century king could read.
• 1606, the grammarian's definition. In his Origem da Lingoa Portuguesa, Duarte Nunes de Leão defined saudade as the memory of something together with the desire for it. That neat definition explains the word perfectly well using other words.
• 1825, Romanticism. Almeida Garrett, living in exile, published his poem Camões in Paris, and it opens with a long invocation to saudade. The poem is often credited with opening Portuguese literature to Romanticism. Saudade became a literary emblem of exile and lost greatness.
• The 1910s, saudade as national identity. The poet Teixeira de Pascoaes and the Renascença Portuguesa movement, through its magazine A Águia, presented saudade as the essence of the "Portuguese soul". Their current of thought became known as saudosismo. A word that defines a nation can't belong to other nations too, so its uniqueness became part of the doctrine.
• The twentieth century, fado and bossa nova. Fado became the art form most closely associated with saudade, and UNESCO added fado to its intangible heritage list in 2011. In Brazil, João Gilberto's 1958 recording of Chega de Saudade, often treated as the birth certificate of bossa nova, sent the word around the world.
• 2004, the list. Today Translations, a London agency, asked about a thousand linguists to name the hardest words to translate. Saudade came seventh. The ranking was reported internationally and recycled for years afterwards, although its method drew plenty of scepticism. World Literature Today looks critically at that survey and at the whole "most untranslatable word" genre.

The myth has impressive parents: a king, several poets, a national movement and two musical genres. What it never had was a serious comparison with how people in other languages talk about missing someone.

How Other Languages Say Saudade

Most languages have an everyday way to say "I miss you" and a weightier noun for longing. Portuguese has exactly that pair, too: sentir falta and saudade. Here are seventeen of saudade's relatives:

Look at the notes column for Romanian and Welsh. Romanian dor gets exactly the treatment saudade gets: a Cafébabel survey of European words of longing calls it untranslatable, with no true counterpart even in saudade. Wales's official website presents hiraeth as a very Welsh feeling that longing, homesickness and nostalgia only approximate. Vladimir Nabokov wrote a long note on toska in his commentary on Eugene Onegin, grading it from spiritual anguish down to plain boredom. In his lectures on Don Quixote, he set Portuguese saudades, French angoisse, German Sehnsucht and Russian toska side by side. When so many languages claim a unique word for the same feeling, the feeling can hardly belong to just one of them.

The grammar is often closer than you'd expect, too. Romanian mi-e dor de tine, roughly "to me is longing of you," is built very much like estou com saudade de você, "I am with saudade of you." French turns the sentence around: tu me manques is literally "you are missing to me." Korean and Japanese often skip the noun: 보고 싶어 (bogo sipeo) and 会いたい (aitai) both mean something like "I want to see you," and both work as "I miss you."

Here's a surprising one. Nostalgia, the word we now reach for to translate saudade, was invented on purpose. Johannes Hofer, a medical student at the University of Basel, coined it in 1688 from the Greek nostos, return to the native land, and algos, pain or grief. He used it for the homesickness he saw in young people living away from home, such as a student from Bern and a servant girl working in another town. Languages make the words they need.

Which word for this feeling does your first language use? Does it come with its own "nobody else has this" legend?

So What Is Special About Saudade?

Something real sits under the myth. It just isn't "no other language can express this."

Translators work with sentences, not with dictionary entries. The linguist Roman Jakobson argued in 1959 that languages differ in what they oblige you to say, rather than in what they allow you to say. Portuguese doesn't own the feeling, but it packages it in an unusual way:

1. It's a noun you carry around. In English you miss someone. In Portuguese you are with saudade, you have it, feel it, and eventually kill it. Treating the feeling as something that arrives and stays produces phrases that English needs a whole clause for.
2. It covers almost anything. A grandmother, a beach in Salvador, your mother's feijão, the year you lived in Recife, a cartoon from your childhood. English switches between "miss," "long for" and "feel nostalgic about." Portuguese uses one word for all of them.
3. It's celebrated. Songs, poems, tattoos, and a Dia da Saudade marked on 30 January in Brazil. A word a culture puts on a pedestal feels deeper than one it merely uses.
4. It's mixed. When researchers in Portugal asked students which features they associate with saudade, frequent answers included memories, sadness, missing someone or something, distance and nostalgia (Neto & Mullet, 2014). English has a word for every one of those. Saudade bundles them together.

Portuguese also has a plainer "miss": sentir falta de. Sinto falta do meu carro means "I miss my car," perhaps because you needed it this morning. Tenho saudade da minha avó means "I miss my grandmother," with affection. Falta is about absence; saudade adds attachment. A Brazilian might say saudade do meu carro antigo, but only if they loved that car. For learners, that distinction is far more useful than any poster.

How to Use Saudade in Brazilian Portuguese

These are the phrases you'll hear most often:

A few practical notes:

• Singular or plural? In Brazil, estou com saudade and estou com saudades mean the same thing. On its own, Saudades! works as a whole message, and you'll see it often in WhatsApp chats between friends who haven't met in a while.
• Watch the preposition. Saudade takes de, so it contracts with articles: saudade do Rio, da praia, dos amigos. Our guide to Brazilian Portuguese contractions covers the pattern.
• Brazil and Portugal differ. In Portugal you'll often hear tenho saudades tuas, using tu. In Brazil, estou com saudade de você is the everyday version.
• Keep it light. Que saudade! for a friend you saw last week is normal, as I learned at that bus station.
• Matar a saudade is the happy ending. You can kill your saudade of a person by visiting them, of a city by going back, or of a dish by finally eating it.

Try this in Falando: Open Journaling and write four or five sentences about something you miss: a person, a place or a dish. Use estou com saudade de once, sinto falta de once and bateu uma saudade once. You'll get feedback on your grammar, vocabulary and style, so you can check that each phrase fits the sentence you built around it.

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People Also Ask

What is the English translation of saudade?

It depends on the sentence. Estou com saudade de você is "I miss you." In more reflective writing, the noun becomes "longing" or "nostalgia," and saudade de casa is "homesickness." No single English word covers every use, which is true of most words.

Is saudade only in Portuguese?

The word itself is shared with Galician, which grew from the same medieval language. The feeling has names everywhere: Romanian dor, Welsh hiraeth, Polish tęsknota, German Sehnsucht and Korean geurium, among many others.

Is saudade a sad or a happy feeling?

Both. It's sad because something is absent and sweet because what's missing was good. Brazilians use it as a warm greeting at least as often as a lament.

What is the difference between saudade and nostalgia?

Portuguese has the word nostalgia too, and it points to the past. Saudade can point to the past, but also to a friend who's alive and well in another city, or to someone you'll see again on Friday.

Find Your Own Saudade in Portuguese

Saudade gets translated every day, in subtitles, song lyrics and bilingual family chats. What a translation can't hand you is the habit. Brazilians reach for the word often, for big losses and tiny absences, and they expect you to answer in kind. If someone tells you que saudade!, the natural reply is também estava com saudade!, "I missed you too!"

Try this in Falando: In Bate-papo, start a conversation about a place you've lived or visited and what you miss about it. Use at least three phrases from the table, then answer the follow-up questions without switching to English. That's where saudade turns from vocabulary into something you say.

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Saudade is part of Falando's A2 vocabulary. Add it to your Reviews, and it will keep coming back until it feels as natural as tudo bem. Vamos lá: what do you have saudade of right now, and can you say it in Portuguese?