Professor Clara Crabbé Rocha
Daughter of Miguel Torga
Another of the author's passions is to know Portugal. Since the time of his stay in Leiria, he crosses the country from an end to the other, noting the landscapes, monuments, ways of speaking, the flavors of bread and wine, the faces of people. In the late 40, he travels by car with a friend that is also an enthusiast of traveling, Fernando Valle Teixeira, whose family lived in Quinta da Raposeira, in Lamego. The holidays in Trás-os-Montes, the hunting and the annual visits to the Gerês thermal springs are also means to know every inch, with a "scholarship acquired by the feet", the Douro terraces, the remotest village, the abandoned Romanesque chapel, the castro in ruins, the highest cliffs in Calcedónia. In 1950 he publishes the book Portugal, an "invention of Portugal" (in the successful formula of a French critic) which is an expression of this learning, of this deciphering and understanding of this country. He has to go three times to Algarve before he found the key or the framing image (to the dwarf fig) which solves that chapter:
"(...) the idea I have of an earthly paradise, where man can live happily in nature, come to me from there. Houses whose roofs, not from culm, or slate, are terraces of an harem for a free and spontaneous love in the moonlight; people that do not cover themselves with croças nor pelicos, but put the lazy shadow of a parasol on the warmth of the body; and tiny figs, dwarfs, sem play, where no Judas can hang of remorse".
The reflection on Portugal incorporates the search for his own identity. Meet the paternal humus is to know himself, and the construction of the "self" is inscribed upon the collective portrait, as in the poem "Portuguese Self-portrait" (Diário, vol. XI.). Torga explains this idea in several passages of his work, for example in a note from 29 st of June 1988:
"Portugal. It was the demand to understand it that I realized something from me. The homelands are giant mirrors where is reflected the smallness of the children. To our measure, we inherited its size. And the uniqueness. All the Alcáceres Quibir and all the Aljubarrotas are in me. I discovered worlds and I'm diveded between them. I also have eight hundred years old and look like a child " (Diário, vol. century).
Clara Rocha, Miguel Torga. Fotobiografia, Lisboa, Publications Dom Quixote, 2000, pag. 103 to 110.