Essay
A Saudade Portuguesa
Not translated into English
Synopsis
The essay follows the word saudade from the Latin solitas, solitude, through its older forms, soidade then suidade, and shows how the proximity of saúde, health, and saudação, greeting, bent its form and meaning. It does so around two threads: an old song, “Saudade minha, quando te veria?”, and the legend of Inês de Castro, which serve to measure what the word has carried in Portuguese poetry.
Context
The book originates in a scholarly question: the Spaniard J. Gómez Ocerín was preparing the critical edition of a seventeenth-century Castilian drama on a Portuguese subject. It appeared in Porto in 1914 from the Renascença Portuguesa, the house of the saudosismo of Teixeira de Pascoaes, which made this feeling the essence of the national soul; the philologist's answer is a history of the word, not a metaphysics. A second edition, revised and enlarged, appeared in 1922, and the text was reprinted in Lisbon in 1966 and 1996.
Who it is for
A short essay, in Portuguese, out of copyright and digitised; it presupposes a taste for etymology, the argument running through medieval forms quoted as they stand.
Prizes and reception
Cited by later studies on the origin of the word, down to the consultations of linguists today, who still debate its hypotheses.
Sources for this page 11
The pages consulted to check this page.