Miguel Torga, doctor and poet of Trás-os-Montes, dies: 17 January 1995

Adolfo Correia da Rocha died on 17 January 1995 at the Portuguese Institute of Oncology in Coimbra, the city where he had practised medicine for more than half a century. He was 87. He had cancer, an illness he had lived with for several years and set down in the last volume of his diary, published in 1993. Most Portuguese knew him by the name on his books: Miguel Torga.3 sources3 sources

Tributes followed within days. A motion passed on 26 January by the council of Terras de Bouro, in the Gerês mountains where Torga went every year to take the waters, lists three: a minute of silence in the European Parliament in Strasbourg on 18 January, a day of national mourning on the 20th, and a page in the French daily Le Monde, which called him the writer who identified most deeply with Portugal.2 sources2 sources

He was not buried in Coimbra. His body went north-east to the cemetery of São Martinho de Anta, the village in Trás-os-Montes where he was born, a place he described as “not a place where, but a place from where” (translated from Portuguese). He lies there in a flat grave, and beside it grows a torga, the mountain heather whose name he took.2 sources2 sources

Plainness was a habit with him. He did not sign autographs or give his books away, so that readers would be free to choose; he published almost everything at his own expense, in austere author's editions; and he opposed the dictatorship for decades without joining a party.3 sources3 sources

Adolfo was born on 12 August 1907 in São Martinho de Anta, a small village in the district of Vila Real, in Trás-os-Montes. His parents, Francisco Correia Rocha and Maria da Conceição Barros, were poor peasants. He admired his father's stubbornness and sense of justice, and his mother appears again and again in his diary and his autobiographical novel.1 source1 source

After primary school in the village he spent a year in Porto as a house servant. In 1918 he went, like many poor boys of the region, to the seminary at Lamego. He stayed a year, long enough to absorb the Bible that later gave titles to his books, and showed no vocation for the priesthood.2 sources2 sources

In 1920, aged 13, he was sent to Brazil to work on the Fazenda de Santa Cruz, his uncle's coffee farm in the state of Minas Gerais. The uncle spared him nothing: the boy hoed coffee, lassoed venomous snakes and kept the farm's accounts. In 1924 he attended the Ginásio Leopoldinense, a secondary school in the town of Leopoldina.2 sources2 sources

In 1925, aged 18, he came home with his uncle, who had noticed how bright he was and offered to pay for his studies in Coimbra as a reward for five years of work. Brazil stayed with him. He went back with his wife in 1954 to see the places of his adolescence.2 sources2 sources

He finished secondary school in three years and in 1928 enrolled in the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Coimbra, where he studied until 1933. He lodged in a república, one of the city's shared student houses, called Estrela do Norte. In 1928 he also published his first book of poems, Ansiedade, which he later withdrew from sale and disowned.2 sources2 sources

Coimbra had a new literary magazine. Presença, a “sheet of art and criticism” launched in March 1927 by José Régio, Branquinho da Fonseca and João Gaspar Simões, printed Fernando Pessoa and other modernists alongside younger writers, and from its fourth issue spelled its title with a small p. Adolfo Rocha wrote for it in 1929 and 1930, and his book Rampa (1930) appeared under its imprint.2 sources2 sources

It did not last. In June 1930 he, Edmundo de Bettencourt and Branquinho da Fonseca left the group, sending Régio and Gaspar Simões a letter that objected to “the perspective of a single kind of freedom” and to a magazine that treated its contributors as masters and pupils (translated from Portuguese). Rocha and Branquinho then produced Sinal, which lasted one issue.2 sources2 sources

In 1934, by then a qualified doctor, he published A Terceira Voz (The Third Voice) under a new name. Miguel was for Miguel de Cervantes and Miguel de Unamuno, two writers of the Iberian Peninsula he admired. Torga was the hardy heather of his native hills. Critics have also seen in the first name Michelangelo and the archangel Michael. The doctor stayed Adolfo Rocha; the writer was Miguel Torga.3 sources3 sources

After graduating he went back to São Martinho, then worked as a general practitioner in Vila Nova, in the municipality of Miranda do Corvo. He trained as an ear, nose and throat specialist in Coimbra, and in 1939 moved to Leiria to practise, while travelling to Coimbra every weekend.1 source1 source

From the early 1940s his surgery was at Largo da Portagem 45, by the bridge over the Mondego in Coimbra, in a building later taken over by a bank. He worked there for more than fifty years. His patients came for their ears and throats, but when the need arose he also acted as paediatrician, orthopaedist and psychiatrist. He went there every day by public transport, stopping at the bookshops of the Baixa, the lower town.1 source1 source

Medicine paid for the writing. He brought out his books in plain author's editions, for reasons, his biographer writes, that had more to do with his readers' pockets than his own, and the Lisbon publisher Dom Quixote began his collected works only in 1999, four years after his death.2 sources2 sources

Between December 1937 and January 1938, Adolfo Rocha crossed northern Spain on his way to Italy, France, Switzerland and Belgium. The Spanish Civil War was still being fought, and the whole of the north was held by Franco's Nationalists. In Portugal the state radio openly backed them. He wrote what he saw into the third volume of his autobiographical novel A Criação do Mundo, titled O Quarto Dia (The Fourth Day), published in April 1939.1 source1 source

The book is, in the words of the Coimbra scholar António Apolinário Lourenço, “the vigorous portrait of a land brutally pacified”. On 30 November 1939 it was seized. The PSP, the public security police, detained its author in Leiria and passed him to the headquarters of the PVDE, and he was held in the Aljube until 2 February 1940.1 source1 source

Accounts of the length differ. The dates in the scholarship give about two months. The Museu do Aljube, now a museum of the resistance in the old prison, says he was arrested in December 1939 and spent three months in its cells. On its second floor it shows “Canção”, a poem he dated in the Aljube on 30 December 1939; his police file is kept in the national archive, the Torre do Tombo.2 sources2 sources

Another, “Ariane”, written in the Aljube in 1940, became his best-known poem of resistance. A sailing ship has anchored in the Tagus, close enough for the prisoner to see. The poem ends with him unable to walk out of the prison and into the arms of the ship.2 sources2 sources

His friends in Leiria stood by him while he was held. On 27 July 1940 he married Andrée Crabbé, a Belgian student of the Azorean writer Vitorino Nemésio whom he had met at Nemésio's house when she came to a summer course in Coimbra. They settled in Coimbra, where their only child, Clara, was born in 1955.2 sources2 sources

The prison stayed in the work. In 1974, thirty-five years after O Quarto Dia, he published O Quinto Dia (The Fifth Day), which dwells on his time in the Aljube. The political police watched him until the end of the regime.1 source1 source

Torga wrote in almost every form: poems, stories, novels, plays, essays and a diary, more than 50 books in all. Most of his prose falls into a few large groups, written over six decades with little change of direction.3 sources3 sources

Bichos (Animals, 1940) is a book of short stories about animals and a few people, read as fables about rebellion, birth and death. In “Cega-Rega” a cicada sings through its short life because, Torga wrote, “to sing was to believe in life and defeat death” (translated from Portuguese). The preface invites the reader aboard a Noah's Ark.1 source1 source

Montanha (Mountain, 1941), stories of the villages of Trás-os-Montes, was seized by the censors. A Rio de Janeiro edition of 1955, retitled Contos da Montanha (Mountain Tales), circulated cautiously in Portugal. With Novos Contos da Montanha (1944) the collections hold 45 stories of humble mountain people, such as the leper Julião, killed by the villagers of Loivos.1 source1 source

A Criação do Mundo is an autobiographical novel in six “days”, published between 1937 and 1981. Its narrator, by the later volumes a young doctor of peasant origins whose studies are paid for by an uncle in Brazil, closely follows Torga's own life. The Diário, 16 volumes published between 1941 and 1993, mixes dated entries, poems, speeches and travel notes. In 1982 the French critic Pierre Veilletet greeted a French selection with the headline “Today, Montaigne is Portuguese. It is Miguel Torga” (translated from French).3 sources3 sources

Portugal (1950) is a tour of the provinces, from the “green nightmare” of the Minho to Sagres, with “Um Reino Maravilhoso” (A Marvellous Kingdom), a lecture of 1941 on Trás-os-Montes. Poemas Ibéricos (1965) grew out of Alguns Poemas Ibéricos (1952) with eleven new poems, and one line changed so that a poem about Spain's suffering became one about the whole peninsula under dictatorship.2 sources2 sources

The regime kept interfering. Manifesto, a magazine Torga founded with Albano Nogueira in 1936, closed after trouble with the censors, its fifth and last issue filled only with his own texts. In 1947 Salazar had his wife dismissed from her teaching post at the Faculty of Letters in Lisbon. The censors stopped a planned magazine, Rebate, and in 1959 seized the eighth volume of the Diário.1 source1 source

Torga took sides openly. He signed “Dos Escritores ao País” (From the Writers to the Country), a manifesto demanding freedom, took part in the second Republican Congress in Aveiro and refused the Grande Prémio Nacional de Literatura because the regime awarded it. After the revolution of 25 April 1974 he spoke at Socialist Party rallies, always as an independent.1 source1 source

His name also went forward for the Nobel Prize in Literature. The Nobel archive, which releases nominations after 50 years, lists eight between 1959 and 1975; Hernâni Cidade proposed him three times. His biographer Isabel Vaz Ponce de Leão records another proposal in 1978. Some Portuguese accounts speak of only two or three candidacies. He never won.5 sources5 sources

Prizes came late. He received the Prémio Montaigne at the Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon on 10 March 1981. In 1989 he was the first winner of the Prémio Camões, the prize for literature in Portuguese that the governments of Portugal and Brazil had set up in 1988. It was presented in Ponta Delgada, in the Azores, on 10 June 1989, during the national day celebrations, at a ceremony presided over by President Mário Soares.3 sources3 sources

Coimbra opened his home at Praceta Fernando Pessoa 3, where he lived from 1953 until his death, as the Casa-Museu Miguel Torga on 12 August 2007, the centenary of his birth. In January 2020, for the 25th anniversary of his death, the city held a tribute there and poetry readings at the oncology institute where he died.3 sources3 sources

In São Martinho de Anta, the Sabrosa council commissioned a cultural centre from the architect Eduardo Souto de Moura, designed and built between 2007 and 2011. The Espaço Miguel Torga is a one-storey building of about 1,500 square metres, clad in slate from Vila Nova de Foz Côa and set among vineyards, with a 110-seat auditorium.2 sources2 sources

On 17 January 2022, the 27th anniversary of his death, his birth house opened as a museum. His daughter, Clara Crabbé Rocha, had given it to the Regional Directorate of Culture for the North. The project cost about €340,000, 90 per cent of it paid by Turismo de Portugal, and the rooms show his passport, hunting licence, diploma and manuscripts.1 source1 source

In the middle of the village stood the negrilho, the old elm that appears in his poems. It dried up in the year he died. Its dead trunk still stands, and his bust has been set beside it.1 source1 source

He has been part of the Portuguese school canon since 1976, and his books have been translated into many European languages and into Chinese and Japanese. Schools and libraries across the country carry his name.1 source1 source