If you go on a walking tour in Lisbon or Porto, or just fall into conversation with a Portuguese person over a glass of wine, sooner or later somebody will bring up saudade.
They’ll tell you it’s a word that can’t be translated — untranslatable, special, uniquely Portuguese — and then, more often than not, spend the next twenty minutes trying to translate it anyway.
So is it really untranslatable? Honestly, I’m not sure it is. Plenty of other languages have a word for more or less the same feeling, and every English speaker already knows what longing and yearning are. But I’ve come to think the word tells you something real about Portugal even so — just maybe not the thing people say it does. Let me explain.
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What does saudade actually mean?
At its simplest, saudade is the feeling of missing someone or something: a longing, a yearning, a wistful ache for a person, a place, a time, a version of your life that isn’t here anymore. “Tenho saudades tuas” is how a Portuguese person says “I miss you” — except it’s built as a noun you have rather than something you do, which is part of why it lands heavier than the English.
But saudade isn’t only sad, and that’s the part people reach for when they call it untranslatable. You can feel the loss and, at the same time, a quiet happiness that the thing was yours to lose in the first place. The 17th-century Portuguese writer Manuel de Melo called it “a pleasure you suffer, an ailment you enjoy,” and that contradiction is really the whole point: the Portuguese enjoy this type of suffering in a way that other nationalities might not.
You can feel it for all sorts of things: a person who’s gone, a place (especially your homeland, if you’ve moved away), a stage of your life, or a stage of a relationship when things were easier. It’s very easy to feel saudade for your twenties as you get older — you remember the good times and feel the sting that they’re behind you. Childhood is the same. Someone will tell you that’s just nostalgia, but Portuguese already has a word for nostalgia (nostalgia). Saudade is meant to be something a little more.
Is it actually untranslatable?
Here I’ll be a mild heretic. Ask enough Portuguese and Brazilian people and a fair few will quietly roll their eyes at the whole “untranslatable” business — it’s a lovely idea that got repeated until it hardened into fact. And the moment you go looking, the uniqueness starts to wobble.
Welsh has hiraeth. Romanian has dor. German has Sehnsucht. Russian has toska, which Nabokov himself reckoned no single English word could carry. Galicia — Portugal’s next-door neighbor — has saudade too, spelled exactly the same, plus morriña, a homesickness so heavy it’s said it can kill you. And English isn’t as empty-handed as the story suggests: longing, yearning, wistfulness, homesickness.
So no — I don’t think saudade is a magic word that exists nowhere else. What I do think is more interesting, and it’s this.
The real difference (in my opinion)
In English we have the words — longing, yearning — but I’d argue we mostly know them from the neck up. We understand them as concepts. Portuguese people seem to know what it is to actually feel them, all the way down.
Some of that is temperament. The Portuguese are poetic and philosophical in a way that’s woven into ordinary life rather than saved for special occasions. And some of it is a comfort with melancholy that genuinely surprises visitors. People come back from Portugal and say the Portuguese seemed sad, or drawn to sad subjects. I don’t read it as sadness, exactly. It’s more that there’s no pressure to appear relentlessly upbeat — none of the American-style insistence (or at least the stereotype of it) that everything is great and you’re living your best life. There’s a comfort in simply living inside a feeling.
And this is the part that matters most to me: saudade is an ailment people enjoy. We all have longing and yearning too — we just try to get rid of them. Saudade is something the Portuguese are happy to marinate in, to savor, to turn over slowly. It isn’t a problem to be solved. It’s a state to be inhabited, and in fado it’s even made beautiful. That, more than any dictionary gap, is what I’d struggle to explain to someone who hadn’t felt it.
Saudade for a time you never lived
Saudade doesn’t only point backward at things you’ve lost. You can feel it for the future — sitting with a friend, having a wonderful time, and aching in advance for the day you won’t get to do this anymore. There might be no reason to think that day is coming. Saudade isn’t especially logical.
You can also feel it for a past you never actually had. Spend any time in Portugal and you’ll notice a saudade for a Portugal of days gone by — the Age of Discoveries, the caravels, the golden century when a small country on the edge of Europe went out and mapped the world. Nobody alive lived through that. It isn’t nostalgia in the strict sense; it’s a longing to have lived it.
This one, at least, isn’t remotely unique to Portugal — which is maybe the best evidence that saudade is a human thing wearing Portuguese clothes. I feel a version of it reading a Jane Austen novel and wishing, for a moment, that I lived in that world. There’s a whole film, Midnight in Paris, built entirely on the idea: a man who longs for 1920s Paris and, once he magically gets there, meets a woman longing for the Belle Époque. Everyone is homesick for a golden age they never saw. That’s saudade.
Saudade, emigration, and the Portuguese psyche
The usual story ties saudade to the Age of Discoveries. The men sailed off across an unmapped ocean, and the wives, mothers, and children left on shore stared out to sea not knowing if they’d ever return. Out of that waiting came fado, and out of fado, saudade as a national art form.
There’s a version of this I find more interesting, though. The people who got on the boats — and later the ones who emigrated to Brazil, to France, to the US, to anywhere with more opportunity — were, broadly, the adventurers. The pioneers. The ones with, as we’d say back home in Ireland, notions. The people who stayed were left with the absence. With the longing. With the saudade.
Some use this to explain a certain Portuguese wariness of ambition, the kind you don’t tend to find in, say, the US. I do see it — but I recognize it because I grew up inside it. Ireland has the very same thing. We’re the descendants of the ones who stayed, and there’s a deep streak of begrudgery, of “who does he think he is,” of telling people not to get ahead of themselves or have notions. If leaving is the ultimate act of having notions, the ones who stayed built a whole culture around not having any.
I’d add one caution to the tidy Discoveries theory, though: it’s a little too tidy. Portugal has been shaped by far more than the 15th century. Nearly fifty years of dictatorship under the Estado Novo shaped the national mood. So did the waves of emigration that have thinned out towns in the decades since — including a fresh one in recent years. Saudade didn’t get frozen in 1500. It keeps getting refilled.
Saudade and fado
It’s no surprise the feeling found its way into the music. Fado — the word means “fate,” a destiny you don’t get to bargain with — is Portugal’s national song, and saudade is its beating heart.
The romantic origin story is the one you’ll hear on a walking tour: fado as the song of the people left behind. Wives and mothers on the docks, watching the boats carry their men off to sea or off to the colonies, singing their longing into the night. It’s a lovely story, and it captures the feeling exactly — saudade for the ones who left by water. I’d just gently point out that fado as an actual musical form is younger than that. It took shape in the working-class and dockside neighborhoods of 19th-century Lisbon — Alfama, Mouraria, Bairro Alto — among sailors, the urban poor, and the taverns they drank in. So the sailors’ longing is less the literal birthplace of fado than its emotional bloodline. The feeling is old; the song that gave it a home is more recent.
Either way, traditional fado is soaked in saudade. The classic themes barely stray from it: fate, the sea, poverty, the city, and above all love that’s lost, absent, or doomed. The whole art form is built to sit inside that ache rather than climb out of it — which is exactly the thing I was describing earlier. Fado doesn’t try to cure the longing. It turns it over slowly and makes it beautiful.
Amália Rodrigues, the singer who defined fado in the twentieth century and carried it around the world, made a career of precisely that: taking sadness and giving it so much dignity you almost envy her for feeling it.
Modern fado — the revival that’s been running since the late 1990s — keeps saudade at the center but loosens everything around it. Singers like Mariza, Ana Moura, Carminho, and Gisela João can be as raw and traditional as anyone who came before, while others, like António Zambujo, stretch the form toward jazz and Brazilian bossa nova.
The subject matter widens too: not just doomed love but Lisbon itself, ordinary life, the present tense. The sound can be contemporary and the venue can be a concert hall rather than a back-room tavern, but the essential move is unchanged — it’s still someone standing up and feeling something out loud, on purpose, in front of strangers.
Fado was even named a UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2011, which is a very official stamp on a very unofficial feeling.
Saudade around the world
When the Portuguese sailed, saudade sailed with them. Brazilians, Angolans, and Cape Verdeans all use the word — Cape Verdeans as sodade, immortalized in Cesária Évora’s song of that name. Brazil even has a Dia da Saudade, celebrated on January 30th. And the Galicians, just across the border in Spain, have saudade too.
So the feeling belongs to a lot of people. What Portugal did was give it pride of place — in the poetry, in the music, in the way people actually live.
The last word
I’ve talked myself into a position, so I’ll say it plainly: I don’t think saudade is untranslatable. I think it’s cultivated. The words exist in English and everywhere else. What’s rarer is a culture that decided this particular ache was worth keeping — worth singing, worth sitting inside instead of rushing past. The Portuguese turned longing into an art form. That, and not the dictionary problem, is the part I’d have real trouble translating.
If you like words like this, saudade isn’t the only one worth knowing. Desenrascado — the Portuguese knack for improvising your way out of a tight spot — is another. Portuguese is full of them, and each one opens a little window onto how the country sees itself.
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