The Tenth Island: Finding Joy, Beauty, and Unexpected Love in the Azores

by Diana Marcum

There is a Portuguese word, saudade, that they say has no translation. It’s bigger than homesickness or missing someone. It’s a yearning that can be expressed in no other language. It is, as one Azorean friend puts it, “a strictly Portuguese word.”

They say it has something to do with death but mostly life and maybe the ocean and probably time, and the only way to understand saudade is to listen to fado, the Portuguese art of the sad song. Or, more accurately, songs of longing.

It was a song by Amalia Rodrigues, the Queen of Fado. I didn’t know the song then, but later I would know it well. They say it’s a tricky thing to translate fado. The words resist a different language. But a rough translation of “A Minha Canção é Saudade”—“My Song Is of Longing”—is:

I cry my own nostalgia I weep in pity for myself I cry, absorbed in my own longing.

THE IMPORTANCE OF DAWDLING THEORY

This theory holds that there is nothing more valuable than time to waste. The most interesting things are the ones tucked in the empty spaces to be discovered when dawdling, loitering, lying in bed. It’s the only part of the universe you can truly call your own.