Source — Amoruso, "Saudade: the untranslatable word for the presence of absence"

• Title: Saudade: the untranslatable word for the presence of absence
• Author: Michael Amoruso
• Publication: Aeon (Aeon Ideas)
• Date: 2018-10-08
• URL: https://aeon.co/ideas/saudade-the-untranslateable-word-for-the-presence-of-absence
• Type: secondary / cultural-history essay, largely accepting the untranslatability claim while historicizing it
• Accessed: 2026-08-28

Extract

• Glosses saudade as longing for a person, place, or experience no longer present or perhaps never fully had — "the presence of absence." Notes the common Portuguese idiom that it is "good to have saudades," i.e. the feeling is register as pleasurable as well as painful (compare Manuel de Melo's line, found independently in other sources, "a pleasure you suffer, an ailment you enjoy" — not itself quoted in this Aeon piece, flagged here for cross-check).
• Etymology: most likely from Latin solitate ("solitude"), possibly crossed with Portuguese saudar ("to greet"); a rival hypothesis derives it from Arabic sawdā' ("melancholy [mood]"). Amoruso frames the Latin-vs-Arabic dispute as live and as itself entangled with Portuguese identity politics (an Arabic etymology sits uneasily with nationalist accounts of the word).
• Untranslatability claim's own history: traced back to King Duarte of Portugal (r. 1433–38), who is credited with asserting the word's singularity in the 15th century — i.e., the claim of untranslatability is itself centuries older than the modern listicle genre.
• The claim's modern currency is attributed to Saudosismo, an early-20th-century Portuguese literary/cultural movement founded in 1912 (two years after the 1910 republican revolution), which sought national renewal through a "cult of Portuguese things." Its founder, Teixeira de Pascoaes, is quoted: "the only people who feel saudade are the Portuguese" — an explicit ethnic-uniqueness claim.
• Notes a further internal split: Brazilian intellectuals distinguished their own saudade as "more happy than sad," against a starker Portuguese melancholy — i.e., even within the word's home language family the affect is not treated as uniform.

Used in

• Saudade
• The untranslatable-words phenomenon (national-mythology angle)