Bateu uma saudade, diz-se no Brasil

Bateu uma saudade, e eu, que não sou reservado, abri-lhe a porta.
Pensava que as saudades eram cinzentas, e ei-la; multicolorida.
Pensava que doíam ou eram de índole aflita. Ora esta entrou serena.
Sentou-se no sofá e sorriu. De tão elegante, ganhou o meu pasmo.
-- A que devo tão inesperada visita?
-- Converti-me às Testemunhas de Jeová. Sou a mais bem sucedida.

Hüzün

The following is an excerpt from Alberto Manguel's book review of Orhan Pamuk's Istanbul: Memories and the City

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All happy cities resemble one another (as Tolstoy famously observed of families) but each melancholy city is melancholy in its own way. The saudade of Lisbon, the tristeza of Burgos, the mufa of Buenos Aires, the mestizia of Turin, the Traurigkeit of Vienna, the ennui of Alexandria, the ghostliness of Prague, the glumness of Glasgow, the dispiritedness of Boston, share only on the surface a common sense of melancholy. According to Orhan Pamuk, the melancholy of Istanbul is hüzün, a Turkish word whose Arabic root (it appears five times in the Koran) denotes a feeling of deep spiritual loss but also a hopeful way of looking at life, “a state of mind that is ultimately as life-affirming as it is negating.” For the Sufis, hüzün is the spiritual anguish we feel because of not being close enough to God; for St John of the Cross, this anguish causes the sufferer to plummet so far down that his soul will, as a result, soar to its divine desire. Hüzün is therefore a sought-after state, and it is the absence, not the presence, of hüzün that causes the sufferer distress. “It is the failure to experience hüzün,” says Pamuk, “that leads him to feel it.” According to Pamuk, hüzün is not a singular preoccupation but a communal emotion, not the melancholy of an individual but the black mood shared by millions. “What I’m trying to explain,” he writes in this delightful, profound, marvelously original book, “is the hüzün of an entire city: of Istanbul.”

(...)

There is a past tense in Turkish that does not exist in English, that allows the writer to distinguish between hearsay and that which he has seen with his own eyes: “when we are relating dreams, fairy tales, or past events we could not have witnessed, we use this tense.”

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The full review: http://www.atelieraldente.de/manguel_0h4/documents/PamukMyCityinRuins.pdf

Alberto Manguel's column in Geist: http://www.geist.com/author/manguel-alberto

July in Lisbon – António and the Seagulls

     When I got back to work after my holidays, the reception was not the usual one. My colleagues and I normally ring at the gate bell and hear the faint ding-dong inside. This time, as soon as we passed through the gate, we were being squawked at by a low flying and menacing seagull.

     Querying the security, we learned that a couple of seagulls decided to have their baby in an inner garden. The security guards have to pass always near that garden, and every time they were threatened by a vigilant mother. She was then backed up by what seemed to be the father, and soon after there were up to six seagulls defending one greyish fluffy-feathered baby.

     This was repeated during three weeks. I was able to observe the mother during my work breaks. She seemed to being on the watch always from the same place. Even during our nightshifts she seemed to be alert all the time. When we heard the defenders' noisily attacks we knew that a security guard was near or in the garden.

     I liked to watch her from the window, smoking a cigarette, examining her nervous task. Her neck must had ached from the constant movement that it required. And some times, still from the window, one could watch her soar with grace, without effort, only to dive and intimidate any intruder. It is easy to see from where Alfred Hitchcock got his idea for “The Birds”. 

     Baby S was soon attempting flight, and each day was seen resting on a different spot of the nearby rooftops. Sometimes the mother was calling, seemingly incentivating baby S to fly to where she had landed. And then one day they were no more. They flew away, probably in the company of all their family. We now ring at the gate bell and hear the faint ding-dong from inside. We get into the yard. We get inside. We work.

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. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 

     JSP is writing a notepoem on the subject of saudade. I keep on failing to find a way of helping  him to grasp something that is linguistically outlandish. I’m not even sure if I understand saudade myself--I was born into the pre-existing concept. But maybe baby S, who would necessarily fly away one day, and the mother, who stressed out for weeks in a row, and the helping party, which was always hidden but soon formed the white harsh wailing squadron to dive Stuka-like over any intruder, maybe they all are elements of saudade.

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«Gulls—the larger species in particular—are resourceful and highly intelligent birds, demonstrating complex methods of communication and a highly developed social structure; for example, many gull colonies display mobbing behaviour, attacking and harassing would-be predators and other intruders. In addition, certain species (e.g. the Herring Gull) have exhibited tool use behaviour. Many species of gull have learned to coexist successfully with humans and have thrived in human habitats. Others rely on kleptoparasitism to get their food. The urban gull population in the United Kingdom has been growing quickly, probably due to laws such as the Clean Air Act 1956, which prohibited the burning of garbage by local landfill owners, thus increasing the availability of food for the gulls.» Excerpt of Wikipedia's article as of 2008-09-01.