I have been listening to sad songs in languages I cannot understand. It started when I stumbled on a Twitter link to this song . I cannot understand Mandarin; I had not, until recently, ever followed either of the musical artists featured in the video. I am not in exile, far from home and family. And yet I’ve been obsessed with this song of homesickness, listening over and over to the ache in the vocals, the clear longing in every line.* There is a word in Portuguese for longing. Months ago, I stumbled upon this BBC travel article describing it: saudade . Saudade is untranslatable, writer Eric Weiner asserts before translating it thus: Saudade is a longing, an ache for a person or place or experience that once brought great pleasure. It is akin to nostalgia but, unlike nostalgia, one can feel saudade for something that’s never happened, and likely never will. At the heart of saudade lies a yawning sense of absence, of loss. Saudade, writes scholar Aubrey Bell in his boo
