Anemoia and Saudade: Old Words for Longing for a Past You Never Knew

English speakers attached anemoia to the ruins of the shopping mall. Portugal, Japan, India, China and Germany had words for longing centuries earlier, and when you ask what those words were longing for, most of them turn out to mean something else.

In inland towns in November the light falls slantwise across the stone walls, and at that hour you can begin to ache for something you never lived through. It is grief with no one dead.

The English-speaking world, only recently persuaded it needed a word for this, calls it anemoia. John Koenig coined it for his Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, joining the Greek ánemos, wind, to nóos, mind, and in a video of December 2014 he called it "a pang of nostalgia for times you've never experienced". I keep meeting it in one neighbourhood: mallsoft, deserted food courts, extinguished fluorescent tubes, the imitation palms of a shopping centre that no longer exists, or never existed in quite that form. That neighbourhood is young as well. Hantasi's Vacant Places dates from 2012 and Cat System Corp.'s Palm Mall from October 2014, two months before Koenig's video. The same project has an album called HIRAETH, described as a home which maybe never was, so even the mall, wanting a name for its ache, reached for Welsh.

I began this piece meaning to say that the feeling is ancient and that other cultures had older and better names for it, with a row of beautiful foreign words to prove it. Then I asked each word a rude question: had the person longing ever actually known the thing?

I. Saudade, mono no aware

Mostly they had. In Portugal saudade has acquired something close to national gravity, and its earliest careful definition is flatly domestic. Around 1438 King Duarte wrote in the Leal Conselheiro that it is what the heart feels on finding itself parted from the presence of a person it loves. Portuguese says matar as saudades, to kill the saudades, and I like the image of a creature living in the body, though in practice the phrase means seeing your friend again. Cesária Évora's "Sodade" concerns people who were really leaving, contract labourers bound for the plantations of São Tomé.

The oddest adjacent case runs between Japan and Brazil, and it may not involve the word at all. The Kasato Maru carried 781 emigrants from Kobe to Santos in 1908, and from the 1980s their descendants began going to Japan to work, a "return", in the anthropologist Takeyuki Tsuda's scare quotes, for people most of whom were born in Brazil. I have found no source that calls what those families feel saudade. A homeland known only through inheritance is still closer to anemoia than anything in Duarte.

Mono no aware, usually rendered as the pathos of things, has no unlived past in it at all: it stays with what is still here and senses its departure beginning. Its formulation as a principle belongs to the eighteenth-century scholar Motoori Norinaga, who read it into The Tale of Genji and held it up as distinctly Japanese. Royall Tyler, who translated the tale, says the expression does not occur there. I still use the phrase for a voice receding into tape hiss, knowing that the lens is Motoori's, and that he was a patriot.

II. Viraha, huaigu

Viraha is the pain of separation from a beloved, and birha, the Bhojpuri song form, gives it a working life. It came out of Ahir herding communities and went to Varanasi and abroad with indentured labourers, and in 1886 George Grierson was already noting its theme of a husband away on service. Hindustani music adds a clock: Raga Marwa belongs to the approach of sunset, and tradition hears longing in it, as you can test on Amir Khan's recording. The singer knows who is missing.

Huaigu, meditation on the past, is a named poetic form in which a writer faces a historical place and measures what has gone from it. Liu Yuxi's "Wuyi Lane" has wild flowers by a bridge, a low sun, and the swallows that once nested in the halls of the great Wang and Xie families of the Eastern Jin, now flying into the houses of ordinary people. In the preface to the sequence Liu says that he had long been a traveller in the south without ever visiting Nanjing, and that this had stayed with him as a regret. He wrote from Hezhou, where he was prefect from about 824. He was mourning long-dead families in a lane he had never seen, in a form with rules, and he is the nearest I have come to the case I was looking for.

III. Sehnsucht, and the task of listening

Sehnsucht goes both ways. Romanticism gave it moonlit paths, blue distances and an emblem in Novalis's blue flower, sought through a novel he never finished, and at that end of its range the object can lie beyond knowledge as well as beyond reach. Then there is Goethe's "Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt", set repeatedly by Schubert and in Russian by Tchaikovsky. I had always taken it to leave the object unnamed. Read on and the longing has an object: someone "der mich liebt und kennt", who loves and knows me, and who is far away.

The row of words still has a use, once nobody offers it as a row of synonyms. The claim that a word cannot be translated tends to end up in the mouth of someone defending a nation: Teixeira de Pascoaes held that only the Portuguese feel saudade, and Motoori we have met. Translators will tell you that they work on sentences anyway. Anna Wierzbicka has warned against using English emotion terms as a measuring rod, which is what I did when I went round asking each of these words about nostalgia. Set beside those words, anemoia looks like what Liu did in Hezhou, except that what was a learned exception for him is now a common appetite: people want to feel the loss without having had the thing.

That bears on the records this magazine covers. When a saturated tape, a harp sounding into an almost empty room, a voice reluctant to stay, makes someone miss what they never had, that listener has several histories to draw on, and few of them were about that ache. The listener can at least put the same rude question to the record, and ask what is being mourned, and who ever had it to lose.

Last revised: July 2026