Soldade Redux

[starrwriter]

I must have some Brazilian ancestry in me because the first time I read the Brazilian word "soldade," I knew intuitively what it meant, even though there is no equivalent word in English.

In fact, soldade is difficult to translate into English. It is close to an ineffable feeling -- an emotion beyond beyond the power of words to convey precisely.

If I was pinned down for a definition, I would say soldade means nostalgia for something that never happened. I realize that doesn't seem to make sense, but it did to me.

The nostalgia is melancholy regret, like longing to be the better person you could have been or pining for the path not taken in life. Robert Frost expressed a kind of soldade as unfulfilled yearning to live in nature with these lines of poetry:

The woods are lovely, dark and deep
But I have promises to keep
And miles to go before I sleep

Soldade is the Brazilian twist on the Portugese word "saudade," which simply means nostalgia. I think Brazilians experience a different kind of nostalgia than the inhabitants of Portugal. It is bittersweet and tinged with voluptuous wildness, like the tropical rainforest of the Amazon.

Brazilian bossa nova music has the characteristics of soldade: reflective and dreamy with a sadness that brings a faint involuntary smile. The 1960s hit song "The Girl From Ipanema" was Antonio Carlos Jobim's soldade-like ode to a beautiful stranger on the beach he never got to know.

Years ago I wrote a short story about a young woman in Rio de Janeiro who felt soldade about the Amazon jungle despite the fact that she had never seen it. Her American lover nicknamed her Soldade as a way to describe her personality.

A single word like soldade can sometimes capture the spirit of an entire culture. As festive and raucous as Carnival is in Brazil, it smacks of a desperate urge to temporarily escape the grim economic realities of the country and dream of better days that never were.

In Spanish the key word for me is esperar, which means both to hope and to wait. English has separate words for these concepts, but the Spanish see a fatalism that connects them: to hope is to wait, perhaps for a very long time without ever reaching the desired outcome.