SAUDADE AND SISU
Esmeralda Cabral’s new book How to Clean a Fish begins with a preface titled “A Word About Saudade.” She writes, “I grew up with saudade, that feeling of melancholy or nostalgia said to be characteristic of the Portuguese temperament.” She is Portuguese, a native of the Azores, transplanted as a child to western Canada where she was raised and now lives with a husband, two children, and a dog named Maggie. How to Clean a Fish is her memoir of a temporary return to Portugal – the result of her husband securing a research project for work on an extended sabbatical from his college teaching job in Vancouver. I welcomed her book enthusiastically; saudade was not a word I knew.
Ms. Cabral has spent most of her life far from Portugal; but Portuguese was her first language, and her mind and heart are imprinted with the memories of a southern European childhood. “By the time we left our island of São Miguel,” she writes, “I was seven years old, and saudade was already ingrained in me.” As was the uniqueness of being uma portuguesa.
“There have been numerous efforts to translate saudade, to capture it with one word in English, but all attempts fall short. This is because, in Portuguese, it is not just a word but a feeling. It is nostalgia and longing, ‘missing you’ and yearning, but it’s also so much more. It’s a deep feeling within your soul of love and loss combined, of trying to capture what may never be again.”
I have respect and admiration for such claims rooted in nationality, or tribal identity, or cultural affinity. Ms. Cabral’s explanation, her “word about saudade,” carries a good measure of what it means to be a Portuguese person – what it means at a level felt deeply in the soul. I am not a Portuguese person, but I can relate to what Ms. Cabral is saying. I believe her.
We Finns also have a concept unique to Finnlanders: sisu. Like saudade, sisu exceeds all attempts at ready translation. In fact, to any self-respecting Finn, every effort to make the meaning of sisu manifest in English feels hollow, even silly. “Strength of will, determination, perseverance, and acting rationally in the face of adversity,” says one source. “Sisu is not momentary courage, but the ability to sustain that courage.” Says another, “stoic determination, tenacity of purpose, grit, bravery, resilience, and hardiness.” All of these words are true, and yet they miss the essence of the thing – for any person of any cultural heritage might readily show determination, tenacity, grit, courage, hardiness. Sisu is something beyond these – something a Finnlander knows she possesses, and knows just as clearly she cannot explain.
Nor can Ms. Cabral explain saudade.
She cannot summarize it with a crisp, neat abstract figure because saudade is a pure feeling, and a complex one, and feelings do not exist as abstractions. As a writer, she cannot summarize saudade with any degree of richness, but she can place you close to it – she can bring you into moments when she feels that bittersweet yearning for something gone and yet touchable at the same time. That, in fact, seems to be the mission of her book: to carry her reader into the atmosphere of saudade, by taking you with her as she re-enters Portugal for a nine-month stay. The smell of the sea on its shores; the devotion to salt cod and sardines; the slant of sunlight as it moves through the seasons in her Lisbon neighborhood. Ms. Cabral is the perfect guide to lead you into the depths of her home country and take you to the edge of saudade. She left Portugal but Portugal never left her – and she feels it profoundly, maybe all the more because she has spent her life away from the place of her heritage. What she feels is saudade; what she is able to convey is a set of snapshots, little stories, which contain only fragrances of saudade. Her book reads like a perfume which lingers in the room.
I am not Portuguese but as a writer, and a writing teacher, I can appreciate her mission; I can smell the fragrance. For many years as I taught the course that became my trademark, a nonfiction writing workshop known as The Nature Essay, I came to caution young writers about the urge to capture the ineffable in sentences and paragraphs. There are many things which, by their nature, must remain unspoken. I was not talking about taboos – “the unutterable name of God” – but impossibilities. One cannot use words to transfer the taste of salt, or the feeling of an orgasm, or the experience of awe. Esmeralda Cabral cannot lead her reader fully into saudade. She can leave us only with a hint, usually in the form of a story or a little scene when she is taken up by this most subtle sense of longing. There is context, and there is story, and then there is the third thing, which no writer can control: what the reader brings to the page in the form of a willing and vivid imagination. Ms. Cabral’s book reminds me not to worry about the writers. My worry lies with the readers. Who is teaching them now, and how well?