Tudo isto é fado

Some Portuguese take great pride in saudade; and claim it uniquely for themselves; a whole industry of explicating saudade to the untutored (i.e. foreigners) has sprung up. The Brazilians, at least, and not without some meanness, have bought it: they say it’s the cause of Portugal’s backwardness.

Some Portuguese don’t buy it. Stuff and nonsense, says one. Of course there is a word for it every language: it’s Sehnsucht in German, longing in English. All this ado, she says, is nothing but deception: a chance to set oneself up as an expert in something, even though that something is an intangible, a mere poetic mood.

(This last is a funny thing for a poet to say).

But perhaps it’s not quite longing: to my ears, saudade may be more like Polish żal and Japanese kokai: the feeling of regret not that something has happened, but, on the contrary, that it has passed away; a longing, yes, but for a better past; a kind of philosophical longing, therefore: one resigned to unfulfilment.

Those familiar with the emotion, often claim unique expertise in it: when asked by the French about that strange mood they heard in his music, Chopin used to say it was ‘that uniquely Polish feeling of żal’. And just as the Portuguese are wont to say about saudade today, he also added: “you French have no word for it.”

Saudade’s prominence in some poetic traditions but not in others offers a chance to marry two theories of emotion: the module theory – that each emotion is produced by a dedicated device in the brain – which predicts that the same emotion would arise in men across the globe, no matter how far apart their cultures (since men with the device are spread equally across the world); and the awareness theory which proposes that an emotion may occur but be either recognized or not and that cultural models make the recognition more or less likely. In short, people everywhere (though perhaps not all people, some being by accident of birth deprived of the device) feel saudade from time to time; but only some have had the opportunity to learn how to recognize the feeling and celebrate it.

An interesting idea suggests itself: perhaps the once-great now-fallen empires – Portugal, Poland, Japan – the vanished supremacies – are more likely to celebrate the mood of longing for the past now irretrievably lost because they actually have a better past; and, more likely than not, one which can never be reclaimed.

Which says an interesting thing about the French: if they have lost a great colonial empire, they seem not to have noticed.