Book, Saudade: from medieval poetry to photography cont: ambiguous feeling[LS]

Language: Brazilian Portuguese. “Where the absent is food, the longing is hunger”, writes Antonio Viera in the Index of the most notable things. The “emperor of the Portuguese language” (as Fernando Pessoa named him) seems to say well, this same language that prides itself on having a single word to designate a feeling whose ambiguity seems untranslatable to other languages ​​– and, therefore, to other cultures. If they are hunger and plural, as the Jesuit preacher wants, the longings are lack, and multiple. Lack, lack, absence of what I was or what was gone, of what was and passed, of what is loved but is not, of what was loved and will never be again, of what is loved and never was. So, as there is no memory without time, there is no longing without memory. That is why painting and especially photography reveal themselves, at the same time, as repositories and provocateurs of the actualization of this pain – not necessarily hopeless but always melancholic – caused by the eternalized image of a moment or a landscape, a person or another feeling. , from a scene or from other times, radically other and singular, unique, irreproducible. Focusing on photography, in a journey that begins with the etymology of the word and its appropriation by medieval poetry, passing through painting, Samuel de Jesus undertakes an exhaustive study on the relationships between that relatively recent invention, today so universal and popularized, and this affection in scope of Luso-Brazilian culture. There is no exaggeration in saying that this is the most complex and monumental study on this feeling that is so dear to us, with the advantage that this essay is the result of a foreign perspective, therefore less subject to the passion with which nostalgia was contemplated by historiography, since the 19th century, including by ultra-conservative ideological currents on both sides of the Atlantic. With impressive erudition, Samuel de Jesus restores the theme of nostalgia in a sophisticated, entirely new and innovative perspective, inaugurating another moment in the biography of this feeling inseparable from any biography.Joaci Pereira FurtadoProfessor at the Institute of Art and Social Communication at the Universidade Federal Fluminense