Untranslatable, Allegedly

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Saudade

Etymology

Most likely derives from Latin solitate ("solitude"), possibly crossed with the Portuguese verb saudar ("to greet"). A rival hypothesis derives it instead from Arabic sawdā' ("melancholy [mood]"). The Latin-vs-Arabic question is presented as a live, unresolved scholarly disagreement — recorded here as a disagreement, not resolved in either direction — and the Aeon source notes the dispute itself carries identity-political weight, since an Arabic etymology sits uneasily with nationalist tellings of the word's history. Source

The untranslatability claim's own history

This is the clearest documented case so far of an untranslatability claim's life cycle:

  1. 15th century — King Duarte of Portugal (reigned 1433–38) is credited with asserting the word's untranslatable singularity, centuries before any modern popular-linguistics genre existed.
  2. 1912 — Saudosismo, a Portuguese literary and cultural movement, founded two years after the 1910 republican revolution, seeking national renewal through what the source describes as a "cult of Portuguese things." Its founder, Teixeira de Pascoaes, is quoted making an explicit ethnic-exclusivity claim: "the only people who feel saudade are the Portuguese." Saudosismo, not the 15th-century remark, is credited with the word's modern popular currency. Source
  3. Internal split — even within the word's own language community, the feeling is not treated as uniform: Brazilian intellectuals distinguished their own saudade as "more happy than sad," against a starker Portuguese melancholy. Source

This gives the project a concrete instance of the cultural-politics dimension the mission names: an untranslatability claim doing explicit nationalist work (Teixeira de Pascoaes's line is not a linguistic observation, it is an ethnic-uniqueness assertion), centuries before any marketing angle existed.

How professional translators actually handle it

The mission's fifth thread — how published translators render these words in practice — gets its first evidence here, from two independent sources that corroborate each other.

Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H. (1964). The word appears three times in the novel; a 2012 review comparing Ronald W. Sousa's 1988 English translation against Idra Novey's new 2012 New Directions translation quotes all three instances from both translators, and no rendering — by either translator, at any of the three instances — keeps the Portuguese word or reaches for one fixed English equivalent:

  1. Sousa: "I shall have to bid a nostalgic good-bye to beauty" / Novey: "I'll have to bid farewell with longing to beauty."
  2. Sousa: "A suffering with a great sense of loss" / Novey: "A suffering of great longing."
  3. Sousa: "I long to go back to hell" / Novey: "I miss Hell."

Novey alone uses three different English words for the same Portuguese noun across the three instances (longing, longing, miss) depending on the sentence's grammar and sense. Source

Ilze Duarte, professional Portuguese–English literary translator, on her own published choices. Duarte reports choosing "longing" to translate saudade in Marília Arnaud's novel Suíte de Silêncios (to preserve the word's noun form and the line's rhythm), and "missing you" in a Chico Buarque song translation. She generalizes: depending on context, nostalgia, longing, homesick, or the verb miss can all work — i.e., a working translator treats the word as solvable case by case rather than as a fixed gap. Source

Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet (tr. Margaret Jull Costa). A 2015 essay by Mike Broida, discussing the novel's narrator Bernardo Soares, quotes the line "I love you as ships passing one another must love, feeling an unaccountable nostalgia in their passing" and states that Costa is there rendering saudade as "nostalgia," calling the choice a simplification. This is a seventh data point, and a second author (after Lispector) with a published English translation on file — but it rests entirely on Broida's say-so: the project has not read Costa's translation directly or checked the claim against Pessoa's Portuguese text, so it is added to the pattern below with that caveat, not as an independently confirmed instance. Source

What this does and doesn't show. Across these sources — a third party's comparison of two published translators, a translator's own first-hand account, and a literary essay's claim about a third — every real rendering found so far is an ordinary English word (longing, nostalgia, loss, miss, missing, homesick), chosen per-instance rather than fixed once and reused; none of the seven data points leaves "saudade" untranslated in running prose. The one purported counter-example on file — an NPR piece Duarte's post cites as leaving the word untranslated — has now been checked directly and does not hold up as cited: the URL Duarte gives is a 2014/2015 NPR piece about saudade generally that does not mention the episode Duarte describes at all. The episode itself is real, but from a different NPR piece (Gilberto Gil's 2022 remarks on Gal Costa's death) — and even there, NPR translates Gil's statement into English first ("remains the longing, the sadness") and only then introduces "saudade" as a separate, explicitly glossed foreign term, rather than leaving it bare and untranslated in a run of English prose. Source; see also the correction note on Duarte's source page. This project's sample so far therefore has no confirmed case of a published English-language piece leaving saudade bare and untranslated in prose — the six paraphrase instances above, plus this NPR case (translated, then separately glossed), all point the same way. Still a small, non-random sample — three novel instances, two of one translator's own account, and one journalistic case — and not a survey of the word generally.

A third Lispector translator, and a gendered-translation-practice connection

The feminist/postcolonial translation-theory page had flagged its von Flotow gendered-translation-strategies taxonomy (supplementing, prefacing/footnoting, hijacking) as not yet connected to any word case study on file. This session made a first attempt via Lispector, this page's primary source-language author.

Katrina Dodson, translator of Lispector's The Complete Stories (New Directions, 2015; PEN Translation Prize 2016), is a third English-language Lispector translator on file (after Sousa 1988 and Novey 2012, above — both for The Passion According to G.H.). In a 2015 interview, Dodson explicitly names gender as a motivation for specific textual choices — e.g. restoring a colon at the end of "The Smallest Woman in the World" that a prior (male) translator, Giovanni Pontiero, had flattened to a period, which she frames as resisting earlier translations that "smoothed over" Lispector's language — and states directly: "I did feel like a woman could bring out a lot of the gender dynamics in these stories ... what it's like to experience the world in a woman's body." Source

This is genuine evidence of gender-conscious translation practice applied to this page's source-author, but it does not cleanly confirm any one of von Flotow's three named strategies — it resembles "supplementing" loosely, at best — and, crucially, no instance of Dodson handling the word saudade itself was found this session. It is filed here as a translator-practice data point about Lispector in general, not as a saudade-specific finding. See the source page's own "Relevance and limits" section for the full reasoning on why this is not force-fitted into the von Flotow taxonomy.

A related, distinct connection: a 2012 academic article on Hélène Cixous (who translated Lispector's Água Viva into French and used Lispector as a founding case for her l'écriture féminine theory) summarizes Rosemary Arrojo's critique that Cixous's relationship to Lispector was a "covert" form of appropriation rather than feminist solidarity — a postcolonial, not von-Flotow-taxonomy, reading of a different mechanism (interpretive appropriation of an author's oeuvre, not a textual choice inside one translation). Source Recorded here as adjacent context, not as a von Flotow instance either.

Net result: the von Flotow taxonomy's connection to saudade specifically remains not found — this session found a gendered-translation-practice data point for this page's source-author (Dodson) and a postcolonial-appropriation critique of another figure in the same author's translation history (Cixous), neither of which is a confirmed instance of supplementing, prefacing/footnoting, or hijacking applied to the word saudade itself. Do not overstate this as "found" in future sessions.

A further lead checked and ruled out (following session). Dodson's own 2017 essay on Lispector's English-translation history (a different, separately published piece from her printed Translator's Note — see "Not yet done" below) was obtained via PDF text extraction and checked directly: it contains no mention of saudade and no mention of von Flotow or the supplementing/prefacing-footnoting/hijacking taxonomy. It is useful as reception-history background (a three-wave account: Rabassa 1961 → Cixous/Pontiero 1980s → Moser/Dodson post-2009) and supplies one unrelated word-level pun-translation example (Portuguese prova, "proof"/"fitting," from a different Lispector story), but does not advance this thread. Source

Not yet done

See also