Barbara Cassin

“It looks like I’m going home, but it’s not home. Maybe it’s because I have no home. Or maybe it’s because it’s when I’m not home that I feel most at home, in a place that feels like home. When are we ever at home?”
― Barbara Cassin, La nostalgie: Quand donc est-on chez soi ?

“Saudade is presented as the key feeling of the Portuguese soul. The word comes from the Latin plural solitates, “solitudes,” but its derivation was influenced by the idea and sonority of the Latin salvus, “in good health,” “safe.” A long tradition that goes back to the origins of Lusophone language, to the thirteenth-century cantiga d’amigo, has repeatedly explored, in literature and philosophy, the special feeling of a people that has always looked beyond its transatlantic horizons. Drawn from a genuine suffering of the soul, saudade became, for philosophical speculation, particularly suitable for expressing the relationship of the human condition to temporality, finitude, and the infinite.”
― Barbara Cassin, Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon