Source — Del Barco, "Brazilian pop star Gal Costa died Thursday at age 77"
- Title: Brazilian pop star Gal Costa died Thursday at age 77
- Reporter: Mandalit del Barco (byline); introduced by host Ailsa Chang
- Publication: NPR, broadcast on All Things Considered
- Date: 2022-11-10
- URL: https://www.npr.org/2022/11/10/1135865127/brazilian-pop-star-gal-costa-died-thursday-at-age-77
- Type: secondary (a news report/broadcast transcript in English, reporting and paraphrasing a Portuguese-language statement by Gilberto Gil); neutral in stance — a straight obituary, not making or contesting any untranslatability claim itself
- Accessed: 2026-08-29 (fetched directly, full transcript text, via a plain browser-UA
curlrequest; NPR's page was not paywalled or JS-gated for this URL)
Extract
This is the actual NPR piece behind the "Gal Costa" / saudade claim on file at second hand via Duarte's post — but Duarte's post cites the wrong URL (a 2014/2015 Alt.Latino episode about saudade in general, which this project fetched directly and confirmed contains no mention of Gal Costa or the quoted sentence at all — see that source's own note below). This 2022 obituary is the piece that actually contains the saudade reference, found independently via web search on the quoted wording, not via Duarte's link.
The exact transcript text (broadcast transcript, reporter narration following a soundbite of Gilberto Gil speaking Portuguese):
"Gil says her gentle voice, the charm of her extraordinary singing goes with her, and with us remains the longing, the sadness. Saudade is a Portuguese word for that sensation, something Brazilian music lovers are feeling with the passing of Gal Costa."
This differs from the sentence attributed to NPR on Duarte's site ("Remaining for us is saudade, the sadness, the grief") in two ways worth recording precisely:
- Wording: the real NPR sentence says "remains the longing, the sadness" in English first, and only names "saudade" as a separate, explicitly glossed sentence immediately after ("Saudade is a Portuguese word for that sensation") — it does not read "remaining for us is saudade" as a single clause, and "grief" does not appear anywhere in the transcript (checked directly against the full page text).
- Function: the loanword is not left bare and untranslated in a run of English prose the way Duarte's post implies. NPR translates Gil's Portuguese statement into English first ("the longing, the sadness") and then introduces "saudade" itself as a labeled foreign term with its own explanatory gloss — closer to reporting on the word than to using it as untranslated English prose.
Gaps
- This project has not obtained the original Portuguese wording of Gil's statement (the transcript marks it as "(Speaking Portuguese)" without giving the Portuguese text), so it cannot independently confirm del Barco's English rendering against Gil's own words.
- Whether Duarte (or her source) paraphrased loosely, misremembered, or conflated this 2022 piece with a different NPR item is not established — only that the sentence as quoted on her site does not match this transcript exactly, and that her cited URL points to a different, unrelated NPR piece.