All of This is Fado (I)

An untranslatable longing or a longing for untranslatability?

Vanquished souls. Lost nights. Bizarre shadows in Mouraria. A ruffian sings. Guitars cry. Love. Jealousy. Ashes and fire.

All of this exists. All of this is sad. All of this is fate. Or rather, all of this is fado. Fate and fado are not the same thing.

In one sense ‘fado’ signifies ‘fate’, but the Portuguese language has the word ‘destino’ for that. Fado is different. Not fate so much as fate set in song. Not fate set in song so much as vanquished souls, lost nights, crying guitars, love, jealousy, ashes and fire set in song. It contains the sadness of existence, and of what exists.

In 2010, I published a book on the Portuguese urban folk music known as fado. I used many of its pages to explore what fado was, to define it, to suggest what it was not. I never found the perfect definition, but I wasn’t really looking for that. I was looking for answers to some of the questions that fado has posed since its emergence as a modern song genre in the nineteenth century and, more tangibly, its existence as a form of recorded song over the last hundred or so years.

Tudo Isto É Fado

One of the definitions I gave for fado was the one I’ve already borrowed for my opening lines above. It comes from the song ‘Tudo Isto É Fado’, recorded by the legendary fadista Amália Rodrigues at Abbey Road in 1952. The song’s lyric, by Aníbal Nazaré, presents a response to a question that the singer has been asked: what is fado? She initially claims not to know before going on to list a number of its features: ‘defeated souls, lost nights, bizarre shadows in Mouraria’. The list continues as it leads to the refrain:

Amor, ciúme
Cinzas e lume
Dor e pecado
Tudo isto existe
Tudo isto é triste
Tudo isto é fado.

Love, jealousy
Ashes and fire
Pain and sin
All of this exists
All of this is sad
All of this is fado

Sonically, the song provides as good an introduction as any to fado, opening with the distinctive tinkle of the guitarra portuguesa, leading into the interplay between guitarra and viola (the Portuguese name for the Spanish guitar) and providing an excellent example of Amália’s art. Within the space of the first short verse, she displays her famous melisma (‘perguntaste-me’) and hovers majestically on the word ‘fado’. It’s easy to hear how this became one of the songs on which her reputation as the ‘queen of fado’ would be built.

Fifteen years on from the publication of Fado and the Place of Longing, I find myself revisiting Nazaré’s take on fado ontology as I work on an essay for a forthcoming collection on Iberian longing. The essay is inevitably flavoured with more recent preoccupations, the kind I rehearse on this platform: the use of objects in songs, the role of songs as evocative objects, the life of songs as they get attached to other objects.

‘Tudo Isto É Fado’ fits well with the songs I’ve been exploring here. It’s clearly about evocative objects. It’s a list song. It’s a song that’s self-referentially about fado itself, what the scholar Lila Ellen Gray calls a ‘meta fado’.¹ And it’s a song that has become an evocative object that can transport listeners to a period in fado’s history and that exists, perhaps more vaguely, in the collective Portuguese imaginary.

As I revisit the song, I’m thinking of those things it lists, how a sense of entirety (‘all of this’) can be marshalled into verse through song’s technologies of condensation, how it places sadness at the heart of all that is, how the bold declaration of the title offers itself as an example for a whole genre, whether the ‘is’ of the title and refrain are also a ‘was’ and ‘will be’, or whether all of what fado ‘is’ changes with time.

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Fado Português

I’m also thinking of some of the song’s companion texts, of the many songs that mythologise fado. In my book, the song I chose to highlight immediately after ‘Tudo Isto É Fado’ was ‘Fado Português’, a mythopoetic account of fado’s origins that appeared first as a poem in José Régio’s 1941 book Fado, and later in abbreviated form put to music by Alain Oulman for Amália to sing.

Fado, in Régio’s account, is the product of Portugal’s maritime history and that famous Lusophone expression of longing, saudade.

O fado nasceu num dia
Em que o vento mal bulia
E o céu o mar prolongava,
Na amurada dum veleiro,
No peito dum marinheiro
Que estando triste, cantava.

Fado was born one day
When the wind barely blew
And the sky and the sea extended,
On the rail of a sailboat,
In the breast of a sailor
Who, feeling sad, sang.

As an origin myth, ‘Fado Português’ takes as many poetic liberties as Ray Henderson, Buddy DeSylva and Lew Brown’s ‘The Birth of the Blues’ and has served similarly as a meta genre song.

Fado’s maritime connections play an important role in Maria Luísa Guerra’s book Fado, Alma de um Povo [Fado, Soul of a People]. Guerra describes the genre as an ‘existential cry’ born of the loneliness of the high seas. One reason for the popularity of the maritime story is the link to Portugal’s long history of exploration, trade and colonial ambition. Lisbon has been an important port for centuries, and most commentators agree that it is the mixing of peoples and cultural practices along the banks of the Tejo that gave birth to fado in the nineteenth century, with Brazilian and African music and dance playing a significant part.

Guerra structures her book about fado around a list of features that provide a ‘thematic profile’ of the genre:

love, hate, shame, separation, hurt, sadness, despair, betrayal, destiny, disgrace, solitude, luck, travel, memory, anxiety, bitterness, fatalism, forgetting, politics, tears, hope, passion, happiness, the human condition, time, life, death, saudade and fado itself.

Except for fado and saudade (which I’ll come back to), this extensive list might well be applied to other song genres. Working through the pages that Guerra devotes to each of these themes, a reader might wonder if there is anything that fado is not about. Yet the list has a certain mood to it—we’re not talking chirpy party songs here—and therefore does a decent job of evoking fado’s song world. As I outlined in my book, I’d want to add to the list an obsession with the city (especially Lisbon and its historic neighbourhoods); a focus on witnessing, carrying and unburdening; and the experience of being a fadista (see ‘Fado de Cada Um’ below).

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Saudade

I said that the nostalgia in ‘Fado Português’ might not only be a longing for home, but also a longing to be away from home. The longing for what one doesn’t have finds its particular Lusophone expression in the famously ‘untranslatable’ word saudade. Saudade is what fado harbours and what puts the wind in fado’s sails, a deliberately mixed metaphor for a mixed emotion.

Saudade is not only a longing for home, but a longing that comes from too long at home, a longing for the beyond. It shares the complexities of other kinds of longing, such as that which Barbara Cassin explores in her book Nostalgia: When Are We Ever At Home? One of Cassin’s case studies, Odysseus, is forever deferring his return home while still providing a model for the homesick maritime explorer.

‘By nights he would lie beside [Calypso], of necessity, in the hollow caverns … in tears and lamentation and sorrow as he looked out over the barren water’.

We have here the very image of nostalgia à la Caspar David Friedrich: Odysseus on his promontory, seen from behind, looking out to sea … the flow of his tears thus dissipating the “sap” and “time” of his life.²

Ideal conditions for Odysseus to invent fado, if only he were Portuguese and his nostalgia were saudade.

Cassin is one of the editors of the monumental Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon. There are entries in the book for ‘fado’ and ‘saudade’, both written by Fernando Santoro. He finds a connection between Odysseus (Ulysses) and the ‘delectable melancholic passion’ known as saudade.

Saudade is … associated with the most important events in Portuguese history and with most of its myths of origin. Ulysses is presented as the mythical founder of Lisbon (Olisipolis—the city of Ulysses): he is supposed to have founded it in a dream, without ever going there. A hero marked by nostalgia, the suffering of the return, he is also supposed to be the mythical ancestor of the saudade felt by the navigators wandering the globe and their wives who waited for them. All the departures for the Reconquista, the Templars’ quest for the Holy Grail, the Crusades, the great maritime discoveries, and twentieth-century migrations accumulated to produce a diaspora that separated the people from their beloved, their families, their villages, and their country. This desire for the beyond that leads the Portuguese to leave is experienced as the effect of saudade and produces an archetypal reminiscence and desire.³

None of the songs I’m discussing in this post contain the word ‘saudade’ (though many fados do), but they all express it in their lyrical content, mode of composition and performance style. In ‘Tudo Isto É Fado’, there’s the longing to state what fado is, even though it can’t be explained. In ‘Fado Português’, there’s the longing to state where fado was born, even though you can’t prove it. In ‘Fado de Cada Um’ (below), there’s the longing to sing yourself away from your destiny, even though you can’t escape it. All three navigate the kind of absences that lie at the heart of saudade.

‘Tudo Isto É Fado’ gets closest to defining saudade when it says that fado is ‘all I know and that I can’t say’. For all the many attempts to explain saudade over the years (in addition to those I’ve cited here, I cover several more in Fado and the Place of Longing), there remains a desire to have a word that is unique to a language community. The longing, then, is a longing for untranslatability.

This, incidentally, is the kind of thing that also drives the creation of wonderful projects such as The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, John Koenig’s ‘compendium of new words for emotions’.

I’d argue that every list, every dictionary, every compendium, every encyclopaedia, is an act of longing, an attempt to make up for an absence.

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Fado de Cada Um

I said earlier that ‘fado’ meant ‘fate’. Then I said it didn’t really, that fado was more than fate. Now I’m going to say that it does again. Fado’s like that, it resonates differently according to what it’s called to bear witness to. ‘Fado de Cada Um’, another song recorded by Amália Rodrigues, is clearly about fate. It uses the word ‘fado’ repeatedly, but in reference to fate, destiny and luck.

Bem pensado, todos temos nosso fado
E quem nasce malfadado, melhor fado não terá
Fado é sorte, e do berço até à morte
Ninguém foge, por mais forte
Ao destino que Deus dá

Well thought-out, we all have our fate
And whoever is born ill-fated will not have a better fate
Fate is luck, and from the cradle to the grave
No one escapes, no matter how strong
The destiny God provides

It’s a song about the fate of each and everyone (‘cada um’), but it’s also about the fate of the individual who sings it. The second verse recounts the singer’s bitter destiny, telling how her sobbing voice gives away her pretence to be someone she’s not. These lines relate directly to the plot of the 1948 film in which Amália performed the song, Fado, História D’uma Cantadeira. She plays a young woman who abandons her family to become a famous fado and flamenco performer. When she sings ‘Fado de Cada Um’ early in the film (below), it’s a hint of a destiny to come. When she returns to it (and to home) at the end, it’s as living proof of the lyric’s conservative prediction.

Lula Pena took the song apart and put it back together in a startling reading on her 2010 album Troubadour, where ‘Fado de Cada Um’ forms the major part of ‘Acto IV’.

Pena turns the song into a ghost haunting the memories of anyone who knows the original. There’s no indication in her track title or in the hard-to-read packaging of the Troubadour CD that this particular fado is going to emerge from the stripped down voice-and guitar song cycle, then no indication whether it will continue for the track’s eight-minute duration. It seems to have disappeared at around four and a half minutes, as the sound world is taken over by percussive fingerwork on the guitar body, then silence, only for ‘Fado de Cada Um’ to rise again in slightly altered form. A strange and beautiful destiny.

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Quatro Palavras

An encyclopaedia article about fado will tell you certain things. The songs I’m sharing here will tell you others. It’s like that with most genres. Ask a country song to tell you about country music, or a metal song to tell you about metal, and you’ll find they reduce things down to the bare essentials, but also open things up through poetry and suggestion.

Or write one yourself. Ask yourself how you would describe your favourite genre in five to ten key words. Put those in a list and you’ve got the makings of a meta song for that genre.

Or take four words, like Marlene Ribeiro does in her track ‘Quatro Palavras’. It’s a composition about memory, about how music can evoke experience and what has been lost, how it can fill an absence.

As related on Bandcamp, ‘Quatro Palavras’ was inspired by Ribeiro’s grandmother Emilia, whose voice can be heard on the track, along with the sounds of her kitchen in Portugal.

Emilia ended up getting excited about me being able to record things there and then and—total news to me—told me she used to sing a lot when she was younger to the point of getting offered studio time but refusing it as she was fearful of what that could imply in those times … From that point I planned to include her in this record as sort of the chance she never had of getting her voice out there.

What are the four words that Ribeiro refers to in her composition? I think there are at least two answers to that question. Ribeiro provides one in her own lyrics that float through the haze of the track’s second half, in which she sings of having four words (‘quatro palavras’) that she keeps to herself, that are her secret.

She offers another answer in her use of the song her grandmother sings: ‘Tudo Isto É Fado’. Another portal is opened here. The lyrics Emilia sings are not the ones Amália made famous. They are the song’s first lyrics, the ones sung by Fernanda Baptista in a recording that predates Amália’s by three years:

Ruas estreitinhas
Casas branquinhas
Povo a passar
Bocas que beijam
E se desejam 
À luz do luar
Gente que reza
Candeia acesa
Dor e pecado
Tudo isto existe
Tudo isto é triste
Tudo isto é fado

Narrow streets
White houses
People passing by 
Mouths that kiss
And desire each other  
In the moonlight 
People who pray
A lit lamp 
Pain and sin 
All of this exists
All of this is sad 
All of this is fado

In the virology of popular song, these words weren’t supposed to last. They were replaced by the lines about the vanquished souls, lost nights, Mouraria shadows, a singing ruffian, crying guitars, love, jealousy, ashes and fire.

But survive they did, rising from their own ashes to emerge from radios, record players, songholders, websites, and the mouth of a grandmother captured for posterity in a Portuguese kitchen.

These alternative words remind us not only that there are always other versions of the songs we know well, but also that the list of things that fado is, or any genre is, will always be prone to revision.

‘Tudo Isto É Fado’ exists as a ghostly object haunting Ribeiro’s ‘Quatro Palavras’, just as ‘Fado de Cada Um’ returned as a spectral presence in Lula Pena’s ‘Acto IV’. The songs live on and give life to new songs. New songs catch what’s going around, host it, pass it on. New objects are made: some of them are fados and all of them are fate.

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In an upcoming post, ‘All of This Is Fado (II)’, I’ll write about the shawl of silence that the poet Mário Cláudio hymned in the wake of Amália’s death, and that the fadista Mísia brought to life in song. I’ll say more about metaphor, ritual, condensation, ontography and lines that list and droop with all the sadness and longing they have to carry.

1. Gray discusses the song in her book about a 1957 live album by Amália: Lila Ellen Gray, Amália at the Olympia, 33 1/3 Europe (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2023).

2. Barbara Cassin, Nostalgia: When Are We Ever at Home?, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault, (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016), 12.

3. Fernando Santoro, ‘Saudade’, in Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon, ed. Barbara Cassin et al., trans. Steven Rendall et al. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), 930.