A Brazilian friend told me there is no English translation of the Portuguese word ‘saudade’. I know it’s used when you miss someone, or you’re homesick. Does anyone have a better translation of ‘saudade’?
I’ve understood it to mean melancholy. I think one of the best musical interpretations of the word is by Love and Rockets
Online translators give longing, yearning, or nostalgia.
It is untranslatable, say the Portuguese. It just expresses a sad longing, I think, but the Portuguese like to think they feel that feeling differently. It depends, of course, on what you mean by translation and translatability: if you want to be strict, no word is really translatable. May I refer to a page on untranslatable words I made ages ago? I called it untrans, haven’t made a new entry for years, but it is still there. I lost interest when I realized that I was boasting instead of doing something useful, but perhaps you get an idea about what other languages try to express and why they do it in a particular way.
A lot of people say that about many expressions. It’s not the case. Just because one language may have a one-word expression for something that another language has a multi-word expression for, does not mean the first expression cannot be translated.
Reminds me of a tweet exchange.
If it’s in the human experience, it can be translated. It just may take a few more words.
Problem Number One.
They also claim to have invented powered flight, Levi’s, and they don’t have the letter X in their alphabet. All claims demonstrability false. (go look up the Cheeseburger post)
But they are a nice lot, in general.
I don’t know that word, but I want the ‘real’ translation of… oh, nevermind. That time has long since passed.
For the most part, I agree with that. But I also think that all languages have subtle meanings conveyed by particulars of that language. For example, languages that have two words for the English ‘to be’, like Portuguese does, can express permanent vs temporary in ways that English speakers really can’t understand without a lengthy explanation on how the two different verbs are used. And in languages that assign gender to all nouns and adjectives, you can change the gender of a noun to express a meaning that’s difficult to explain to people that speak languages that don’t have noun gender.
After being married to a Brazilian and speaking Portuguese for more than three decades, I don’t get the special status given to saudades.
The thought is expressed well enough, if imperfectly, in English as others have pointed out. There are many other words that lose nuance to a similar degree in translation.
Now, as far as going the other direction, my go-to word is actually a phrase: “to take for granted”. That is one that we really do take for granted in our language, and there isn’t a pleasant way to say that in Portuguese.
Really? In Spanish it’s usually “tomar por hecho,” literally “take as done.” I assume there’s a similar expression in Portuguese.
But now I see what you mean. It might not have quite the same implication of “fail to explicitly or consciously give credit to another’s contribution” as the English phrase.
Similarly, I don’t think there’s a concise way to say in Spanish what is implied in the English phrase “to look forward to.”
The Brazilian bossa nova master Antonio Carlos Jobim wrote a song called Chega de Saudade and he translated it as No More Blues.
Every time I ever skipped Portuguese class, the instructor would razz me next time saying “que saudade” (roughly “we missed you and we were sad”). It’s a word that pops up everywhere in Brazilian music, and there’s a Portuguese genre of music called saudade which revolves substantially around missing people and things.
It’s overstating the matter to say that saudade is untranslatable. It just means “missing,” but you can’t use “missing” as a decontextualized word in English. Not so in Portuguese, where saudade is an expression and emotional valence unto itself.
Just to be sure, I asked my better half if tomar por feito exists in Brazilian Portuguese and she says it doesn’t. That doesn’t mean it can’t exist in some other region, or in Angola or some other Portuguese speaking region.
Tô animado!
It has a “I can’t wait” vibe.
Cool - thanks.
Just to be clear… that’s Brazilian Portuguese (and the first word is the colloquial way of saying estou). No idea about how one says it in Spanish.
Yes… the little hat was a giveaway. 