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I first heard the word Saudade from my friend Clara Bicalho, long before this project ever started, when I first met her. Something she couldn’t quite translate, something famous for being untranslatable, something to do with the feelings we have for the people and things we’ll never have again. Or maybe we will. Maybe it’s painful, maybe that pain is a pleasure. I forgot. Six months later we found ourselves in the same country again, and we got to talking about my project. “Do you remember the word I taught you?”

I began to be fascinated by the idea that perhaps another form of missing existed. My understanding of missing in English was pretty limited. Maybe there was something I’d been feeling all along, but had never had a word for.

We decided to find other Portuguese speakers— “Have you ever heard of Saudade?” We would ask them each to translate it directly and then ask a series of questions that would hopefully invite them to take ownership of the process and use and invent their own methods of translating. As a language-lover, I couldn’t resist the mystique of the word. As a headstrong person, I couldn’t resist the challenge of untranslatability. As a troublemaker, I couldn’t resist what I was sure would become an argument.

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