Many people who don’t speak any Portuguese at all still know the word 'saudade' -  the feeling of nostalgic longing for something, or someone, that may never come back.

Saudade needs different expressions to be translated into other languages. It's present in the daily life of native speakers of Portuguese and is a constant theme in Brazilian, Portuguese and Cape Verdean music. But for Portuguese speakers living abroad, the term acquires a much stronger meaning.

Usually considered untranslatable, the word and the feeling 'saudade' is a major Portuguese heritage in the former colonies.

“The sense of guilt that comes with Catholicism is very strong in the Iberian Peninsula and it makes this feeling of melancholy very strong in Portugal,” explains Brazilian musician Nelson Latif:

“In Brazil, the melancholy of the Portuguese blended with the horrific conditions of the Africans, the slaves that couldn’t go back to their lands of origin. And it turned into a kind of embedded feeling of saudade. Saudade is under our skin. Brazilians feel a lot of saudade.”

Missing yourself
Having lived abroad for many years in South Korea, Indonesia, Portugal and the Netherlands, Nelson Latif was confronted with this feeling in an even stronger way.

“What the immigrant feels is saudade for him- or herself, and that is very difficult. You miss the way you were once part of society, the person who you once were. It is a very tricky feeling, because it is a way of denying reality. You create something idyllic - the childhood, the youth that you had - and that can be very complicated, because you want to go back to something that exists only in your mind.”

Milan Kundera, in his book 'Ignorance', mentions that this feeling comes when you have distanced yourself to the point of not knowing anymore what is going on - you are apart, you are out. Brazilian photographer Neyde Lantyer, who has lived in the Netherlands for almost ten years, refers to this:

“To live abroad creates a feeling of disconnection, and I believe that this is what hurts. I feel bad for not knowing, not being around what is happening in Brazil nowadays,” says Lantyer. “I am permanently in a state of saudade. Not only for Brazil, but also for the past.”

For the Portuguese fado singer Maria de Fátima, who has lived in the Netherlands for 29 years, saudade is best described not as 'homesickness', but as a desire for something that will never come back. A feeling that she sings about in many fados. “Almost all fado lyrics are about saudade. Saudade for a lost love, for the past. It is the most important word in fado, and, through fado, it is known worldwide.”

Paradox
For these three immigrants – and probably for many others – one thing is true: the distance from the homeland, strangely enough, also brought a greater proximity with it, through the feeling of saudade and through music.

“When I feel saudade I sing. It is the only way to make it hurt less. I sing to express all that I feel. I give my saudade to my public, and they feel it,” says Maria de Fátima.

”In Brazil I used to play jazz. Being abroad, I rediscovered Brazilian culture and fell in love with it. Nowadays I play samba, choro, typical Brazilian music,” says guitarist Nelson Latif.

Although coming from the field of fine arts, Neyde Lantyer started a project of Brazilian music in the Netherlands – subconsciously, she thinks, as a way of getting closer to Brazil. “Paradoxically, the greatest encounter that a person can have with him- or herself,” she believes, “is when they leave their roots and the proximity of who they are.”