Source — Broida, "The City of Lost Things: Rediscovering Fernando Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet"

• Title: The City of Lost Things: Rediscovering Fernando Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet
• Author: Mike Broida
• Publication: The Millions
• Date: 2015-09-23
• URL: https://themillions.com/2015/09/the-city-of-lost-things-rediscovering-fernando-pessoas-the-book-of-disquiet.html
• Type: secondary / literary essay; credulous of the untranslatability claim ("saudade is untranslatable into English and only really done by approximations")
• Accessed: 2026-08-29

Extract

A personal-essay appreciation of Fernando Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet (narrated by Pessoa's heteronym Bernardo Soares), read in Margaret Jull Costa's English translation. In a section on loss and Lisbon, Broida quotes a Soares line — "I love you as ships passing one another must love, feeling an unaccountable nostalgia in their passing" — and states directly that the underlying Portuguese word Costa is rendering there is saudade, translated as "nostalgia" "for the sake of simplicity": "The Portuguese have a special word for this 'unaccountable' feeling or longing to reach back into the past and capture a moment lost to the stream of time: saudade. Here, the translator Margaret Jull Costa translates it as 'nostalgia' for the sake of simplicity."

Broida goes on to assert the word is "untranslatable into English and only really done by approximations like 'nostalgia,'" then quotes a second Soares passage to illustrate the feeling itself rather than the word: "With the aid of a cheap cigarette I can return, like someone revisiting a place where they spent their youth, to the time in my life when I used to smoke. The light tang of that cigarette smoke is enough for me to relive the whole of my past life." This second quotation is not presented as containing "saudade" itself — it illustrates the feeling Broida associates with the word, not a further translation instance.

This is the project's first data point for a Pessoa translation specifically (distinct from the existing Lispector/Sousa/Novey evidence on the saudade page): one more published literary translator (Costa) rendering saudade with an ordinary English word (nostalgia) rather than leaving it untranslated — consistent with every other data point on file.

Gaps

• This project has not read Costa's full translation or checked the original Portuguese text directly — the claim that the quoted line translates a sentence containing "saudade" rests entirely on Broida's assertion, not on the project's own comparison of source and target text (unlike the Lispector case, where Breselor quotes both translators against each other but likewise does not quote the Portuguese original either — this project has still never checked a saudade case against the Portuguese source text itself).
• No page/chapter locator is given for the quoted line, and Costa's edition (Serpent's Tail, 1991, or a later reissue) is not specified by the essay.
• Broida gives no indication of Costa's own reasoning for the choice — this is the essay's inference about the translation, not a translator's-note account of it (cf. Duarte's first-hand account, already on file).

2026-08-29 update (session 10): session 9's log entry raised "trecho 230" (a Pessoa-text blog's numbering of Livro do Desassossego, containing "...esta mesma emoção é a saudade da infância perdida") as a possible Portuguese-side lead. Checked directly this session: trecho 230's full text was fetched and read, and it does not contain any ships/navios-passing imagery — it is a distinct, unrelated saudade instance (about childhood, not about ships passing). Trecho 230 is therefore ruled out as the source of Broida's quoted line; it does not confirm or narrow the data point. The actual Portuguese sentence behind Broida's English quote remains unlocated by this project — extensive web search (English-phrase search, Portuguese back-translation guesses, Arquivo Pessoa's own site search, a Livro do Desassossego saudade-tag blog) turned up nothing matching. This data point stays unconfirmed; see the caution below on a search-tool failure mode encountered while trying.

• Search-tool caution: one WebSearch call this session returned a synthesized "answer" asserting the original Portuguese reads "há saudades desconhecidas na passagem" — a specific, plausible-looking quote. A follow-up direct search for that exact string found no source containing it anywhere; it does not appear in any of the search's own cited links either. Treat WebSearch's prose "answer" as a summary that can include content not actually present in its cited sources, especially exact quotes in a foreign language — verify any quoted claim by fetching the source page directly (as wiki/conventions.md already requires for citations generally) before filing it.

Used in

• Saudade