Vida

Adolfo Correia da Rocha was born at 11 a.m. on 12 August 1907 in S. Martinho de Anta, municipality of Sabrosa, district of Vila Real, between the warm shale of the Douro region and the cold granite of the northeastern Trás-os-Montes. A primitive village, native earth, Agarez as he calls it in a mythical projection of his native land. The humus that feeds him and that nourishes him. The ground of his roots, from where he views the country and the world in his moss green eyes.

He grew up in a poor, honourable family, determined to open up his horizons. His father, Francisco Correia da Rocha, blonde with blue eyes, was the support, the vital stake. His mother, Maria da Conceição de Barros, greenish eyes, olive eyes, a sweet voice, the warmth of her welcoming lap. He passed the fourth grade with merit. Raised to serve in Porto, a year at the Lamego Seminary, the certainty that he didn’t want to be a priest. At the age of 13 he left for Brazil to work on his uncle's farm. He returned five years later, completed high school in three years, trained as a doctor at the University of Coimbra with an average of 15 on a scale of 0-20. He worked as a general practitioner in Sendim, Miranda do Douro, Leiria and, finally, Coimbra. The hand that writes is the hand that prescribes.

In 1934, he changed his name to Miguel Torga, his pen name. Miguel in honour of Cervantes and Unamuno. Torga is a wild mountain plant, tough-rooted heather. A doctor and poet in the bone, in the flesh, in the skin, in the soul. He travelled between Portugal and Italy, through a Spain ravished by the Civil War. His book The Fourth Day of The Creation of the World was seized, he was interrogated by the Political Police (PIDE) and spent three months in Aljube prison. An uncomfortable, non-conforming voice, rebellious in both flesh and blood.

He’s a dissatisfied poet, he sometimes writes in duplicate, typing with carbon paper. And he rewrites. He patches up things by hand, he cuts off strips of paper and glues them to the pages. His world is a torrent of emotions, volitions, passions, intellections. His days are chronicles, novels, memorials, testaments. A dedicated doctor, an ear, nose and throat specialist, an otolaryngologist for over 50 years. He travels the world and describes it in depth. He discusses dogmas, defies common sense, embraces rebellion. He is who he is. Exactly as he is. He's a hunter too, a left-handed shot, wiry-legged, he shoots woodcock, partridge and snipe in the mountains and hills. He is one of the most influential Portuguese poets and writers, the author of a vast literary repertoire. A Poet Laureate with several national and international literary prizes, he was awarded the first Camões Prize in 1989 and was twice nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature. He edited his own books for many years.

He died on 17 January 1995. He is buried in a shallow grave in S. Martinho de Anta cemetery, with a heather bush nearby, as he requested.

Timeline in the first person

My childhood. “I would leave the seat of my pants on the slides in the hills, rip my shirt to shreds chasing lizards through brambles, there were no knee pads capable of withstanding me crawling into the disused mines, looking for badgers inside.”

Raised to serve in Porto.“I was a doorman. But I also watered the garden, ran errands, served as a donkey for the younger boys, dusted, polished the fine metal staircase with Coração ointment. I would walk around in a white jacket, sleep in a cubicle, with a bell by the side of the bed, and earned fifteen cents a month.”

Setting sail to Brazil by boat in the autumn. I was 13 years old. I docked on the other side of the Atlantic on a sunny Monday “I was carrying a bulging suitcase. Four rough cloth sheets, five pillows, a flannel blanket, a bedspread, a cashmere garment, two shirts, two pairs of underwear, five towels, six bottles of Roncão port wine and a dozen sausages.”

Writing in my youth. “I was writing poetry haphazardly. For some reason or another I’d produce a sonnet, an ode, or something nameless, but it rhymed. I filled notebooks with quatrains, where love demanded pain, longing, kindness, beautiful stars, your moon, pale chrysalis, etc.”

Return to Portugal. “It was late in the afternoon when the anchor was drawn out of the mud in the docks and slid up the hull. Slowly, the bow of the boat began to move and the Brazil of my sufferings began to fade away behind us. First, the urban mass of the city; then the round ribbons of the coastal roads; then Sugarloaf Mountain; finally, the coastline, increasingly blurred. Major and minor accidents I had endured with childish tears. Tears I no longer had...”

Literature. “We were faced by constant challenges, without compromise, without complacency, sure of our renewed mission. Few and united, we challenged the whole of Portugal, which remained blind to its routine, its conformism, its rhetoric. We conducted every graphic and literary experiment we could, countless daring attempts”

Love. “Love had finally come knocking at the door, after a thousand drills and denials. All former appearances ceased to have any significance in the face of the present evidence. No emotional upheaval undergone in this chapter up to now could compare to the excitement I now felt before each encounter”

The doctor and his patients. “I always panicked in the presence of those creatures, until recently complete strangers, defenceless, confidently displaying the miseries of body and soul.”

Doctor-poet-writer. “My professional duty, creative devotion, has been fulfilled. I would prepare my scalpel and pick up my pen. And I had the impression that the sores I’d recently been treating were now on the pages I was opening. The paper bled like open wounds, and the poems sounded like howls.”

A doctor in Coimbra, he worked as a general practitioner at Casa dos Pescadores de Buarcos, in Figueira da Foz, twice a week “I lived in a little old house perched on a ravine overlooking the river. Green islets covered in orange groves down below. Mountain boats, loaded with firewood and bundles of washed clothes, coming down from Penacova. On Sundays and holy days, Baptist groups would sing hymns on the sand and the neophytes would dive devoutly into the crystal-clear current, which reflected the row of houses erected in a crib in the hills.”

The hunter. “The primitive man that had always been inside me only ever came to the surface as a cartridge bag on my belt. As far as my senses were concerned, hunting was a return to original purity. From the clothes I wore, dressed in an old vestment that clung to the movements of my body like a second skin, to the healthy frugality of my lunch, which was always the same, to the wine I occasionally drank, everything was part of a secret rapport with the sacredness of nature.”

Trip to Europe. The Spanish Civil War. “Dazed, we all saw how the rubble, the remnants of useless heroicness and the satanic sterility of its path were even more terrible than the war itself. What was left behind, although terrifying, was still alive, and as such the instinct of preservation could at least feed the hope of escape. Our spirits were now flooded with total despondency, withering the energy of despair at the root.”

Arrested by the PIDE, hours of sitting around, frozen, thinking. Buried alive. “Caged like a wild beast, deprived of the most elementary means of hygiene, hearing and smelling our own noises and smells, without a voice, without rights, without action, condemned to a merely vegetative, functional existence, like a still, food entering and leaving, sleep and wakefulness alternating in the pendular repetition of the same absurdity.”

The regime, the dictatorship.The discontented voice. “Those that failed to run with the pack either rotted in a dungeon or died of hunger. The entire nation was now a tomb of silence and a lack of will. In the fields, factories, schools and offices, the tough profile of the dictator seemed to listen to the voice of everyone’s own conscience. And consciences were silent in the deepest depths, fearful of any revealing expression. No position, from the highest to the lowest, was filled without the approval of the political police.”

25 April. “A single cannon aimed at it was enough for the fortress to collapse. Surprised by the miracle, the national soul exploded with joy. From north to south, transfigured crowds filled the streets in an impulse of unrestrained renewed hope. It seemed like a dream! (…) Unfurled flags of all colours smiled in the limpid atmosphere of April. (…) The homeland would finally regain its voice and dignity”

Trip to Africa, in search of a Portuguese way of being in Africa. Luanda, Angola, “(…) the city resembled a Sodom of irresponsibility surrounded by a curse”. The island of Mozambique, an oasis of hope, all the combinations and human reactions carried out on the small reef.

His land. “The bond of his roots with the native land? After so much wandering, so much suffering, so much studying, the umbilical cord was still connected to the matrix. He really had a landscape, surroundings, a vital geographic site engraved in his chromosomes! His body was capable of running all over the world, and his spirit of flying in every direction. Wherever they arrived, they would always denounce the mark of origin, the unmistakable singularity, a kind of taste of the land of provenance, like that of fruit.”

Old age. “I feared decay, I didn’t fear death. To stop writing, to stop loving, to stop hunting would be the ultimate misfortune.”

At the end of his life, the man he was. “The man, who on the outside looked like a monolith of certainties, was an amalgam of doubts on the inside. Thirsty for the absolute, he had only known the bitter taste of the relative. Deeply religious, he had never been able to kneel before an altar. Deeply affectionate, he had created, without knowing why, in addition to solid friendships, a number of bitter enemies. From an unhealthy shyness, he had spent his days making up for it with violent acts. Superstitious and insecure at every step, he had moved me through the realm of realities like a willing ghost.”