Saudade and Longing – Pessoa, Lagerkvist and the Unreachable Horizon

There are words that refuse to be translated. They stay in their own language like houses built of a particular stone, impossible to move without crumbling. The Portuguese word saudade is one of them. It means roughly longing, but it is a longing pointed backward and forward at once – a missing of something that has been, mixed with an intimation of something that perhaps will never come. It is the form of love that sorrow takes.

All of Portuguese literature seems to have been written in the light of saudade. From the medieval cantigas de amigo, in which women sing to the lovers who have sailed away, to the smoky laments of fado in the back streets of Lisbon – it is the same mood that returns, generation after generation. And perhaps saudade is not a specifically Portuguese property, but a name for something universally human that the other languages simply happened to lack a word for.

Pessoa: longing for the selves I never was

Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) is perhaps the most singular interpreter of Portuguese saudade. He wrote under more than seventy different names – so-called heteronyms – each of whom had a biography, a style and, above all, a sorrow of his own. Alberto Caeiro was the shepherd who did not believe in anything beyond the visible. Ricardo Reis was the classical Horatian. Álvaro de Campos was modernism's runaway engineer. And behind them all sat Pessoa himself, a quiet clerk in Lisbon, alone in his room.

To read Pessoa is to meet longing not as a feeling but as a method. He longed systematically for the persons he never became. The heteronyms are ways of living all the lives the one life did not contain – and therefore also ways of mourning them. His saudade is not a missing of a past, but of a simultaneous life elsewhere, in someone else he also is.

“Tenho em mim todos os sonhos do mundo. / I bear within me all the dreams of the world.”

”Tabacaria” – The Tobacconist – is perhaps the greatest single poem in twentieth-century Portuguese. It is set one morning by a window, opposite a tobacconist's shop. The poet watches the life outside the pane and realizes that he is no one, that he will never become anything, and that he nevertheless carries all the possibilities of the world within him. It is saudade gone cosmic – a longing not for a place or a person, but to exist at all.

Lagerkvist: longing as faith

Swedish literature has no easy equivalent for saudade, but it has Pär Lagerkvist (1891–1974). In his late poetry – especially in the collection ”Aftonland” (Evening Land) from 1953 – one finds a longing of the same metaphysical pitch as Pessoa's, but in an entirely different key. Where Pessoa is discursive and city-bound, Lagerkvist is sparse, half-biblical, searching.

Lagerkvist lost his childhood faith early and called himself a ”religious atheist”. His whole work circles the question of what to do with the longing for God once one can no longer believe in God. His answer is: one keeps longing. Longing becomes the very substance of faith. It needs no object to be real.

“It is most beautiful at twilight. / All the love the sky contains / lies gathered in a dim light / over the earth, / over the houses of the field.”

This is saudade in Swedish, even if the word is not used. Twilight is neither night nor day, neither presence nor absence. It is precisely that interval in which longing can breathe. Lagerkvist knew that the most beautiful does not lie in fulfilment but in the gentle sorrow that follows from knowing fulfilment will not come. His poem is not a complaint but a grateful acknowledgement that imperfection too has its own light.

Cesário Verde: longing for another life

Before Pessoa there was Cesário Verde (1855–1886), a young merchant in Lisbon who died of tuberculosis at thirty-one and managed to write a handful of poems that changed Portuguese poetry. Pessoa called him his most beloved predecessor and hailed him as the one who had taught Portuguese verse to see the city.

In Verde saudade is not a longing for what is lost but for what was never lived. In the long poem ”O Sentimento dum Ocidental” – The Feeling of a Westerner – the speaker walks through Lisbon one evening and observes workers leaving the factories, women washing by the river, soldiers marching past. He sees all of this as someone uninvolved, as if his own life were going on somewhere else and he just happened to find himself here.

It is a modern experience, perhaps the modern experience. Saudade has here become the basic feeling of the metropolis: to be surrounded by people and yet to miss one's own life. Verde died before he had time to write the poem this feeling was waiting for. Pessoa would write it for him, a generation later, in the same city.

Fado: when longing becomes music

Saudade also has its own musical language: fado. The word means ”fate”, and the music was born in the back streets of Lisbon in the first half of the nineteenth century, probably as a mixture of sailors' songs, African rhythms from the Portuguese colonies and an older romance tradition. The classical fado has a singer – often a woman, a fadista – and two guitars: a Spanish one and a Portuguese one.

The great fadista Amália Rodrigues (1920–1999) sang many texts by the major poets of her time, including several by Pessoa. When she sang his ”Lágrima” – Tear – the relation between saudade and poetry became almost circular: the poet wrote a text about longing, the singer gave it a melody that was itself longing, and the listener discovered that she had known all along what the word meant without being able to say it.

Translating the untranslatable

Every attempt to translate saudade becomes a compromise. ”Longing” is too active, ”wistfulness” too quiet, ”missing” too bound to an object, ”melancholy” too heavy. The Brazilian poet Olavo Bilac once wrote that saudade is ”the presence of an absence”, and that is perhaps the closest formula anyone has come to.

But one might also say: saudade is the feeling that arises when one realizes that even what we have is already disappearing. It is not a sorrow that follows on loss, but a sorrow built into love itself, from the first moment. To love someone is already to be in the process of losing them. To live in a city is already to feel saudade for the city it will no longer be ten years from now.

Three voices, one horizon

Pessoa, Lagerkvist and Verde share neither language, generation nor worldview. But they share something more important: an attentiveness to the point in existence where longing stops being about a specific object and becomes a basic tone of consciousness itself. Pessoa calls it being many. Lagerkvist calls it living in the twilight. Verde calls it being a Westerner in a harbour town.

They are all the same thing: standing at the horizon and knowing it can never be reached. Saudade is not the sorrow of not having arrived. It is the capacity to keep walking nonetheless, with the horizon still in view. It is, if you like, a way of holding the world dear even as it slips away.

“All that I have loved has vanished. / All that I have loved is near.”

Two lines, one contradiction, an entire life. That is roughly what saudade sounds like in Swedish, when someone finally finds the pitch.