Sehnsucht (German pronunciation: [ˈzeːnˌzʊxt]) is a German noun translated as "longing", "pining", "yearning", or "craving", or in a wider sense a type of "intensely missing". However, Sehnsucht is difficult to translate adequately and describes a deep emotional state. Its meaning is similar to the Portuguese word Saudade, or the Romanian word dor. Sehnsucht is a compound word, originating from an ardent longing or yearning (das Sehnen) and a long or lingering illness (das Siechtum). However, these words do not adequately encapsulate the full meaning of their resulting compound, even when considered together.
Some psychologists use the word sehnsucht to represent thoughts and feelings about all facets of life that are unfinished or imperfect, paired with a yearning for ideal alternative experiences. It has been referred to as “life’s longings”; or an individual’s search for happiness while coping with the reality of unattainable wishes. Such feelings are usually profound, and tend to be accompanied by both positive and negative feelings. This produces what has often been described as an ambiguous emotional occurrence.
Psychologists have worked to capture the essence of Sehnsucht by identifying its six core characteristics: “(a) utopian conceptions of ideal development; (b) sense of incompleteness and imperfection of life; (c) conjoint time focus on the past, present, and future; (d) ambivalent (bittersweet) emotions; (e) reflection and evaluation of one’s life; and (f) symbolic richness.”
In a cross-cultural study conducted to determine whether the German concept of Sehnsucht could be generalized to the United States, four samples of American and German participants “rated their 2 most important life longings and completed measures of subjective well-being and health.” German and American participants did not differ in their ability to identify life longings or the intensity of their Sehnsucht. However, German participants associated it more with unattainable, utopian states while Americans reported the concept as not as important to everyday life.
Some researchers posit that Sehnsucht has a developmental function that involves life management. By imagining overarching and possibly unachievable goals, individuals may be able to create direction in their life by developing more tangible goals, or “stepping stones” that will aid them on their path toward their ideal self. "[Sehnsucht has] important developmental functions, including giving directionality for life planning and helping to cope with loss and important, yet unattainable wishes by pursuing them in one’s imagination." It can also operate as a self-regulatory mechanism.
However, in a study that attempted to discover whether Sehnsucht played an active role in one’s ability to influence their own development, psychologists asked 81 participants to report “their most important personal goals and life longings, and [evaluate] these with respect to their cognitive, emotional, and action-related characteristics.”Results showed that goals were perceived as more closely linked to everyday actions, and as such more controllable. Sehnsucht, on the other hand, was reported as more related to the past and future, and therefore more emotionally and developmentally ambiguous.
Also, in a study conducted in 2009, 168 middle-aged childless women were asked to rate their wish for children according to intensity and attainability. If the women rated their wish as intense and long-standing, their wish was considered a life-longing. If they rated their wish as intense and attainable, it was simply a goal. “The pursuit of the wish for children as a life longing was positively related to well-being only when participants had high control over the experience of this life longing and when other self-regulation strategies (goal adjustment) failed.”
Saudade (European Portuguese: [sɐwˈðaðɨ], Brazilian Portuguese: [sawˈdadi] or [sawˈdadʒi], Galician: [sawˈðaðe]; plural saudades) is a deep emotional state of nostalgic or profound melancholic longing for an absent something or someone that one loves. Moreover, it often carries a repressed knowledge that the object of longing might never return. One English translation of the word is missingness, although it might not convey the feeling of deep emotion attached to the word "saudade". Stronger forms of saudade might be felt towards people and things whose whereabouts are unknown, such as a lost lover, or a family member who has gone missing, moved away, separated, or died.
Saudade was once described as "the love that remains" after someone is gone. Saudade is the recollection of feelings, experiences, places, or events that once brought excitement, pleasure, well-being, which now triggers the senses and makes one live again. It can be described as an emptiness, like someone (e.g., one’s children, parents, sibling, grandparents, friends, pets) or something (e.g., places, things one used to do in childhood, or other activities performed in the past) that should be there in a particular moment is missing, and the individual feels this absence. It brings sad and happy feelings altogether, sadness for missing and happiness for having experienced the feeling.
Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt
Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt
Weiß, was ich leide!
Allein und abgetrennt
Von aller Freude,
Seh ich ans Firmament
Nach jener Seite.
Ach! der mich liebt und kennt,
Ist in der Weite.
Es schwindelt mir, es brennt
Mein Eingeweide.
Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt
Weiß, was ich leide!
Only those who know longing
Know what sorrows me!
Alone and separated
From all joy,
I behold the firmament
From yonder side.
Ah! the one who loves and knows me
Is in the vast unknown.
It dizzies me, it burns
my guts.
Only those who know longing
Know how I suffer!
None but the lonely heart
Can know my sadness
Alone and parted
Far from joy and gladness
Heaven’s boundless arch I see
Spread out above me
O(h) what a distance drear to one
Who loves me
None but the lonely heart
Can know my sadness
Alone and parted far
From joy and gladness
Alone and parted far
From joy and gladness
My senses fail
A burning fire
Devours me
None but the lonely heart
Can know my sadness
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sehnsucht
Saudade is a word in Portuguese and Galician that claims no direct translation in English. In German it is equivalent to Sehnsucht. In Portuguese, "Tenho saudades tuas" (European Portuguese) or "Estou com saudades de você" (Brazilian Portuguese), translates as "I have (feel) saudade of you" meaning "I miss you", but carries a much stronger tone. In fact, one can have saudade of someone whom one is with, but have some feeling of loss towards the past or the future. For example, one can have "saudade" towards part of the relationship or emotions once experienced for/with someone, though the person in question is still part of one’s life, as in "Tenho saudade do que fomos" (I feel "saudade" of the way we were). Another example can illustrate this use of the word saudade: "Que saudade!" indicating a general feeling of longing, whereby the object of longing can be a general and undefined entity/occasion/person/group/period etc. This feeling of longing can be accompanied or better described by an abstract will to be where the object of longing is.
Despite being hard to translate, saudade has equivalent words in other cultures, and is often related to music styles expressing this feeling such as the blues for African-Americans, dor in Romania, Tizita in Ethiopia, or Assouf for the Tuareg people, appocundria in Neapolitan. In Slovak, the word is clivota or cnenie, in Czech, the word is stesk and Sehnsucht in German.
The similar melancholic music style is known in Bosnia-Herzegovina as sevdah (ultimately from Arabic سَوْدَاء sawdā’ : ‘black [bile]’, translation of the Greek µέλαινα χολή, mélaina cholē from which the term melancholy is derived).
Nascimento and Meandro (2005)cite Duarte Nunes Leão’s definition of saudade: "Memory of something with a desire for it."
In Brazil, the day of Saudade is officially celebrated on 30 January.
The word saudade was used in the Cancioneiro da Ajuda (13th century), in the Cancioneiro da Vaticana and by poets of the time of King Denis of Portugal (reigned 1279–1325). Some specialists say the word may have originated during the Great Portuguese Discoveries, giving meaning to the sadness felt about those who departed on journeys to unknown seas and disappeared in shipwrecks, died in battle, or simply never returned. Those who stayed behind—mostly women and children—suffered deeply in their absence. However, the Portuguese discoveries only started in 1415 and since the word has been found in earlier texts, this does not constitute a very good explanation. The Reconquista also offers a plausible explanation.
The state of mind has subsequently become a "Portuguese way of life": a constant feeling of absence, the sadness of something that’s missing, wishful longing for completeness or wholeness and the yearning for the return of that now gone, a desire for presence as opposed to absence—as it is said in Portuguese, a strong desire to matar as saudades (lit. to kill the saudades).
In the latter half of the 20th century, saudade became associated with the feeling of longing for one’s homeland, as hundreds of thousands of Portuguese-speaking people left in search of better futures in South America, North America and Western Europe. Besides the implications derived from a wave of emigration trend from the motherland, historically speaking saudade is the term associated with the decline of Portugal’s role in world politics and trade. During the so-called "Golden Age", synonymous with the era of discoveries, Portugal undeniably rose to the status of a world power, and its monarchy became one of the richest in Europe. But with the rise of competition from other European nations, the country went both colonially and economically into a prolonged period of decay. This period of decline and resignation from the world’s cultural stage marked the rise of saudade, aptly described by a sentence in Portugal’s national anthem: Levantai hoje de novo o esplendor de Portugal (Lift up once again today the splendour of Portugal).
Saudade is similar but not equal to nostalgia, a word that also exists in Portuguese.
In the book In Portugal of 1912, A. F. G. Bell writes:
The famous saudade of the Portuguese is a vague and constant desire for something that does not and probably cannot exist, for something other than the present, a turning towards the past or towards the future; not an active discontent or poignant sadness but an indolent dreaming wistfulness.
A stronger form of saudade may be felt towards people and things whose whereabouts are unknown, such as old ways and sayings; a lost lover who is sadly missed; a faraway place where one was raised; loved ones who have died; feelings and stimuli one used to have; and the faded, yet golden memories of youth. Although it relates to feelings of melancholy and fond memories of things/people/days gone by, it can be a rush of sadness coupled with a paradoxical joy derived from acceptance of fate and the hope of recovering or substituting what is lost by something that will either fill in the void or provide consolation.
To F. D. Santos, Saudade as a noun has become a longing for longing itself:
There was an evolution from saudades (plural) to Saudade (singular, preferably written with a capital S), which became a philosophical concept. … Saudade has an object; however, its object has become itself, for it means ‘nostalgia for nostalgia’, a meta-nostalgia, a longing oriented toward the longing itself. It is no more the Loved One or the ‘Return’ that is desired, based on a sense of loss and absence. Now, Desire desires Desire itself, as in the poetry of love for love’s sake in Arabic, or as in Lope de Vega’s famous epigram about the Portuguese who was crying for his love for Love itself. Or, rather, as poetess Florbela Espanca put it, I long for the longings I don’t have (‘Anoitecer’, Espanca 1923).
Posted by bernawy hugues kossi huo on 2018-01-03 10:37:19
Tagged: , Lindenberg , holistic , healing , Sehnsucht , sausade , wish , unattainable , imagination , poetry , emotional , rescue , meaning , psychologist , being , life , head , sculpture , management , headlock , stepping , stone , mechanism , absence , desirable , experience , missing , sadness , Goethe
