Source — Duarte, "Saudade and Untranslatability"
- Title: Saudade and Untranslatability
- Author: Ilze Duarte
- Publication: ilzeduarteliterarytranslator.com (Duarte's own site; she is a working Portuguese–English literary translator)
- Date: 2022-11-11 (updated 2022-11-14)
- URL: https://www.ilzeduarteliterarytranslator.com/post/saudade-and-untranslatability
- Type: primary, in the narrow sense that Duarte is herself the translator reporting her own published choices — first-person translator testimony, not a third party's account; skeptical of the untranslatability claim
- Accessed: 2026-08-28
Extract
Duarte, a professional literary translator, argues against treating saudade as untranslatable and reports two of her own published translation choices directly:
- Translating Marília Arnaud's novel Suíte de Silêncios: "In my translation, I wanted to maintain the idea of saudade as a noun to preserve the rhythm of the lines, and so I chose 'longing' for saudade."
- Translating a Chico Buarque song: "In this song by Chico Buarque..., I chose to translate saudade as 'missing you.'"
She generalizes from her own practice: "Depending on the context, nostalgia or longing may be adequate translations. If one feels saudade for their hometown or country, 'being homesick' may be suitable. If one feels saudade for a time gone by, 'longing' or 'nostalgia' may fit. If it isn't crucial to maintain the word as a noun, then the verb 'miss' would probably work too." This corroborates, from an independent working translator, the pattern the project's other translator-practice source (Breselor's review of the Lispector translations) shows from the outside: real translators pick a different ordinary English word depending on grammatical role and context, rather than reaching for one fixed gloss or leaving the word untranslated.
She also cites one case of the opposite choice — leaving the word untranslated — in an unrelated context: an NPR piece on the singer Gal Costa that keeps "saudade" in Portuguese in an English sentence ("Remaining for us is saudade, the sadness, the grief"), cited via https://www.npr.org/sections/altlatino/2014/02/28/282552613/saudade-an-untranslatable-undeniably-potent-word — this project has not fetched the NPR piece directly; the quotation is at second hand via Duarte's post.
Gaps
- Bibliographic detail on the Arnaud translation (publisher, year, page) is not given here and has not been independently checked.
- The NPR/Gal Costa citation is unverified at second hand (see above) — do not treat it as a confirmed independent data point until the NPR piece itself is fetched.
2026-08-29 note — the NPR citation, checked directly
This project fetched the URL Duarte cites (https://www.npr.org/sections/altlatino/2014/02/28/282552613/saudade-an-untranslatable-undeniably-potent-word, a 2014/2015 NPR Alt.Latino episode about saudade in Brazilian music generally) directly, in full — via a plain browser-UA curl request; the page is not paywalled or JS-gated. It does not mention Gal Costa anywhere and does not contain the quoted sentence ("Remaining for us is saudade, the sadness, the grief") or anything resembling it. The URL is simply the wrong piece for the claim attributed to it.
The claim itself is not baseless, though: a web search on the quoted wording turned up a different NPR piece — Mandalit del Barco's November 2022 obituary of Gal Costa on All Things Considered — which does discuss saudade in connection with Gal Costa's death, in a statement from Gilberto Gil. But the actual transcript text differs from Duarte's quotation in wording ("remains the longing, the sadness" / "Saudade is a Portuguese word for that sensation," not "Remaining for us is saudade, the sadness, the grief"; "grief" does not appear) and, more importantly, in what it shows: NPR translates Gil's statement into English first and then names "saudade" as a labeled, explicitly glossed foreign term — not the same as leaving the word bare and untranslated in running English prose. See the new source record for this piece: npr-delbarco-2022-gal-costa-obituary.md. Do not cite the URL above (the 2014/2015 Alt.Latino episode) for the Gal Costa claim again — it has been checked and does not support it.