When Katia Guerreiro began to sing, I couldn’t understand a word. I don’t know Portuguese. But within minutes, I was transfixed. She sang with such authenticity and intensity that I felt, rather than understood the emotion in her song. It was soulful, reflective, uplifting.
Katia sings fado, a genre of Portuguese music and poetry that is famous for its melancholic songs. Fado is broadly translated as fate and the poems pulse with the pain of unrequited love, loss and longing. These emotions are anchored in saudade, another untranslatable Portuguese word that kind of means nostalgia, tinged with sadness.
An hour of Katia’s singing, I still understood not a word. But my hair was standing on its end, my eyes were blurred, my throat had a lump. I could barely breathe. With fado, feelings have a force because they arise from deep within.
