Saudade as a Cultural Concept | Encyclopedia MDPI

Saudade as a Cultural Concept: Comparison

Please note this is a comparison between Version 2 by Pearl Wu and Version 1 by Susana Amante.

Saudade is a cultural concept expressing a profound sense of longing, nostalgia, or melancholy associated with absence, loss, or unattainable experiences. Emerging in medieval Portugal and shaped by historical, social, and literary developments, it has evolved from an individual emotion into a collective cultural construct reflecting the identity, history, and aesthetic sensibilities of Lusophone communities. Drawing on peer-reviewed scholarship and interdisciplinary research in cultural studies, this entry examines how saudade is expressed in the literature, music, and philosophical discourse, and its role in national memory, emigration, and cultural imagination. While sometimes described as untranslatable, its uniqueness reflects deep historical and cultural embedding rather than a linguistic limitation. Saudade, therefore, functions as a multilayered symbolic category, revealing the interplay between emotion, language, and cultural identity in Lusophone contexts.

saudade
Portuguese culture
fado
cultural identity
cultural construct

The significance of saudade in Lusophone cultural identity and national imagination has been broadly acknowledged. The term is widely used in everyday language and artistic expression, where it often serves as a way of expressing a specifically Lusophone sensibility and relationship to the past ^[1].

However, one must note that its relevance is not exclusive to Portugal; saudade is also a common and culturally meaningful experience in other Portuguese-speaking countries, notably Brazil, where it is sufficiently emblematic to be officially commemorated with a national day dedicated to saudade ^[2]. In medieval Galician–Portuguese lyric poetry, particularly in the cantigas de amigo, it appears in an archaic form (soidade) in works attributed to King Dinis I ^[3]. In Portugal and Galicia, it is indeed a recurring theme in the literature, from the works of Luís Vaz de Camões to Rosalía de Castro [4,5]^[4][5], but, in musical forms, it is no less important in Amália Rodrigues’s fado, and in the Cape Verdean morna, famously performed by Cesária Évora, who similarly evokes the feelings and lived experiences commonly associated with sodade, as exemplified in the song by the same name, whose rhythms, lyrics, and vocal delivery convey longing and emotional depth ^[6]. In Brazil, saudade likewise plays a central role in poetry and popular music, including the work of Vinícius de Moraes ^[5]. The sentiment is especially prominent in musical traditions such as choro, often described by the musicians of Choro Aventuroso as a precursor or the “grandfather” of Bossa Nova. It is also found in several forms of Samba, particularly the Samba-Canção, often considered the “child of choro”, whose slower tempo and lyrical emphasis frequently foreground themes of longing, memory, and emotional distance.

Historically, scholarly interest in the concept has been closely linked to the collective experiences of separation, such as maritime expansion, emigration, and exile, which have contributed to its enduring presence in narratives of national memory and identity ^[7]. Only in recent decades has saudade attracted systematic attention in the social sciences, including psychology, expanding its analysis beyond artistic representation to encompass social, emotional, and cultural practices.

One of the most frequently cited features of saudade is its reputed “untranslatability”, a claim that has played an important role in shaping its symbolic status in cultural and linguistic debates. The widespread nature of this perception is illustrated by a 2004 report from Today Translations, which identified saudade as “the seventh most difficult word to translate” ^[8] (p. 1). Although it is commonly rendered in English through terms “such as longing, yearning, missing, homesickness, or nostalgia” ^[2] (p. 41), none of these equivalents fully captures its semantic and cultural scope as understood by Portuguese speakers. Russell et al. also claimed that saudade has frequently been characterised as one of the emotions that “exist but go nameless in English” ^[9] (p. ix). This perceived resistance to translation has contributed both to the mystification of saudade and to its prominence in comparative linguistic and cultural debates. Rather than seeing its untranslatability as a limitation of language, many scholars view it as reflecting the concept’s deep roots in culture and history, qualities that cannot be fully captured outside the social and symbolic contexts in which it emerged and developed.

This entry provides an overview of saudade from a humanities perspective, drawing in particular on cultural studies. Its purpose is to clarify, situate, and comparatively examine the concept under discussion through engagement with established academic scholarship. The analysis draws primarily on peer-reviewed studies indexed in major international databases, including Scopus, across disciplines such as cultural studies, philosophy, linguistics, and sociology. Where appropriate, historical, literary, and other primary cultural materials are considered insofar as they are addressed and interpreted within the scholarly literature. Methodologically, the entry is informed by a historical–cultural perspective and by conceptual and comparative analysis. This approach makes it possible to outline how meanings have been defined, debated, and reinterpreted across different linguistic and cultural contexts.

The following sections examine the origins and historical development of Saudade, its role in the literature and the arts, philosophical interpretations, related concepts and comparative perspectives. The entry concludes by summarising the enduring cultural significance of saudade and its relevance for understanding Lusophone cultural identities.

References

Farrell, P. Portuguese Saudade and other emotions of absence and longing. In Semantic Primes and Universal Grammar: Empirical Evidence from the Romance Languages; Peeters, B., Ed.; John Benjamins: Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 2006; pp. 235–258.
Neto, F.; Mullet, E. Saudade: Precipitating events, feelings, and coping strategies. Psychol. Thought 2022, 15, 40–56.
Borowski, G. Nieprzekładalność jako mit: Krytyczna rewizja pojęcia saudade. Przekładaniec 2025, 24, 208–224.
Angélico, J. Reverberações da Saudade. Uma exploração da identidade cultural galega na revista Nós (1920–1935). Diacrítica 2025, 39, 144–165.
Almeida, I.; Rodrigues, J. Ikigai and saudade, cultural meanings lived through the body. Cult. Psychol. 2024, 31, 697–712.
Martin, C. Cesária Évora: “The Barefoot Diva” and Other Stories. Transition 2010, 103, 82–97.
Leal, J. The making of Saudade. National identity and ethnic psychology in Portugal. In Roots and Rituals. The Construction of Ethnic Identities; Dekker, T., Helsloot, J., Wijers, C., Eds.; Het Spinhuis: Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 2000; pp. 267–287.
Neto, F.; Mullet, E. Recalled saudade is associated with positive affect, close connectedness, and inspiration. Personal. Individ. Differ. 2020, 154, 1–5.
Russell, J.; Fernández-Dols, J.M.; Manstead, A.; Wellenkamp, J. Everyday Conceptions of Emotion: An Introduction to the Psychology, Anthropology, and Linguistics of Emotion; Kluwer Academic: Dordrecht, The Netherlands, 1995.