Saudade isn't untranslatable. Some Portuguese speakers, usually those who are not proficient in English, think it is. Same goes for Romanians and the word: "dor" (which means the same as saudade and it's mentioned in the wiki). It usually just means: "longing".
From the wiki about saudade:
The rock band
Extreme has a Portuguese guitarist
Nuno Bettencourt; the influence of his heritage can be seen in the band's album
Saudades de Rock. During recording, the mission statement was to bring back musicality to the medium. "Nancy Spain", a song by Barney Rush, made famous by an adaptation by
Christy Moore, is another example of the use of
saudade in contemporary Irish music, the chorus of which is:
"No matter where I wander I'm still haunted by your name
The portrait of your beauty stays the same
Standing by the ocean wondering where you've gone
If you'll return again
Where is the ring I gave to Nancy Spain?"
That's saudade. You have to be able to speak Portuguese to understand those lyrics. No one else could possibly relate. They only managed to reach those deep feelings, because their guitarist is from Portugal. You can see how that entire wiki is written by people who desperately want to prove a point. Listen to the songs they reference, look at the poems, it's nothing that can't be translated with "yearning", "longing" or "nostalgia", depending on the context. All those feelings can also be expressed in a deep and poetic manner.
The Good Son, a 1990 album by
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, was heavily informed by Cave's mental state at the time, which he has described as
saudade. He told journalist Chris Bohn: "When I explained to someone that what I wanted to write about was the memory of things that I thought were lost for me, I was told that the Portuguese word for this feeling was
saudade. It's not nostalgia but something sadder."
That's just nostalgia. Nostalgia can be very sad.
There's a good debate on reddit, where two people who know Portuguese and English explain why it's not untranslatable (while a guy who speaks English, but not Portuguese, tries to counter-argue):
https://www.reddit.com/r/DoesNotTranslate/comments/1bay2v/_/c95am6v
Edit: I don't know why it looks like an image. You can click it.
This is concise and well written:
As a fluent Portuguese speaker, I agree 100% with what you said. Longing, yearning and even nostalgia convey perfectly the meaning of saudade. The only reason some lusophones think it's unstranslatable is because of the way they express the feeling of missing someone in their language. While in English (I miss you), Spanish (te extraño) and French (tu me manques) this feeling is expressed with a verb, in Portuguese (estou com saudades) it is expressed with a noun. That's also why saudade feels more powerful, because being a noun, it expresses a whole concept and it's one of the reasons why it's such an important word in genres such as Brazilian bossa nova and Portuguese fados. That being said, it's only deep and special from a Portuguese speaker's point of view.
I'm not trying to devalue it. The Romanian word "dor" has a huge place in our culture, but it's not unique, nor untranslatable. Google translate won't change its place in Romanian culture, because it says it means: "longing".
"Serendipity" means "the faculty or phenomenon of finding valuable or agreeable things not sought for" and it's very hard to translate it from English to another language (I'd need a long phrase to do it in Romanian) and "schadenfreude" is "pleasure derived by someone from another person's misfortune". Those count as being untranslatable. Saudade isn't special, because you sometimes might want to add the word "intense" in front of "yearning", "longing" or "nostalgia".
Another annoying wannabe special word is: "ennui". That one just literally means boredom. "A feeling of listlessness and dissatisfaction arising from a lack of occupation or excitement" is boredom. The existence of pretentious French poetry containing that word doesn't suddenly make it untranslatable, nor it being tied to some part of French culture. The fact that "boredom" isn't a very poetic sounding word doesn't change its meaning.
This would be like Americans saying "freedom" is impossible to translate, because of how deeply tied it is to American culture, or Germans doing it with "order". The North Koreans are capable of translating "freedom" and the Somalis can translate "order". There's no need for a special relationship with the word.
Just like with saudade, if you google "dor Romanian word", you'll find a ton of stuff about how incredibly unique it is, unless you get a native English speaker who knows Romanian or a Romanian proficient in English. Then, you'll get stuff like this:
Romanian’s Special Word: DOR He's a bit wrong, we can say "mi-ai lipsit" ("I missed you") as a casual way of saying we missed someone.
Someone from Portugal/Romania grows up reading their country's literature. He's aware of their country's masterpieces. He's told saudade/dor is special. English is mostly experienced thru the internet, mainstream music and movies. Of course a word like saudade/dor is going to then look far better than various English equivalents. The internet associates nostalgia with being a 90s kid or playing video games on the NES/SNES. Longing is associated with "I long for you" and it's viewed as being almost exclusively about having a sexual desire for someone. Yearning isn't well known (non native speakers tend not to know
The New Colossus). If that person then starts going deeper into the culture of one or more English speaking countries, they get a fuller understanding of those words and realise the ones from their native language that they thought were uniquely sophisticated are not really like that.
Wiki gives this for longing:
Longing - Wikipedia ->
Desire - Wikipedia
It literally has a painting called
Saudade, the same one used in the wiki for saudade.
Nostalgia - Wikipedia