Tabucchi’s ‘Saudade’: Compare to ‘Inquietudine’

Abstract

This paper examines the term Saudade as it appears in the work of Italian author Antonio Tabucchi, comparing it to Inquietudine. Saudade is an untranslatable Portuguese word associated with that country’s mythology, history, and identity. Since various definitions of Saudade exist among scholars, this paper focuses on Saudade as perceived by Tabucchi. Influenced by Fernando Pessoa’s alter ego, Álvaro de Campos, Tabucchi defined Saudade as follows. First, it is a plural concept that is contagious through experience. The second is Nostos. In ancient Greek literature, Nostos, the heroic epic of sailing the seas and returning home, was imprinted as one of the narratives of Saudade in the history of Portuguese sailing across the Atlantic, where Tabucchi took the idea of wandering, of voyaging, of going far away to unfamiliar places where you don’t know what awaits you, guided by the wind and the waves. The last is an interpretation of Saudade as the avant-garde and futurism. It shattered the past and made us face its fragments. Tabucchi’s conceptualization of Saudade is distinctly different from that of internalized anxiety. While Saudade is a plural concept that can be contagious, internal anxiety is a singular concept that deals with the simple and understated evil of fear of human existence, which is shared by all and is, therefore, not contagious. Also, unlike Saudade, which can be experienced by anyone, but is rooted in Portuguese culture, internal anxiety is a sentiment that transcends nationality, culture, and ideology. In conclusion, Tabucchi completes Inquietudine with Desassossego, a two-way otherness that embodies the inability to live as the inability to exist, with no distinction between subject and object; Nostalgia, the feeling of being in a completed past, to an impossible object; and finally, Osmosis, the interpretation of Saudade by Pessoa’s alter ego Campos.