SAUDADE

sau-DAH-j -- (n.) A profound melancholy for something or someone that is lost.

Behold a word of many layers. The Portuguese word "saudade" is that feeling or memory for something that is no longer; a profound longing for something that has been lost and cannot be returned. At once beautiful and sad, profound and sacred, ethereal and real. Wordeby's is of the opinion that English is lacking when it comes to words describing the nuances of loss. Generally, English tends to be fairly literal when it comes to this spectrum of the human emotion. And if not literal then very straightforward. We have to cross the pond into the Romance languages in order to discover words like Saudade. Such is the evolution of language -- with lexical gaps in one language, we borrow from another. In this case, Saudade can be those places and things one used to do in childhood, or grandparents dearly loved and dearly missed, saudade can be both a sense of sadness for what is gone and a happiness for having had it once. Saudade is at once beautiful as it is tragic and in its truest form, profound enough to move us in ways we cannot forget.

~Wordeby's by Chanel Rion

🦋ART: "A Rider and His Steed" (1879) by Jean-Léon Gérôme

🦋STYLE: Academic

🦋NATIONALITY: French