Adolfo Rocha | Biography

Miguel Torga's vast literary production is characterized by a humanist portrayal of the land and the people of Portugal. Although he was not directly involved in politics, he denounced all types of human oppression. He focused specifically on the tyrannical dictatorship of António de Oliveira Salazar, who violated human rights in Portugal for more than forty years, from 1926 to 1974. A contemporary of two major European upheavals--the Spanish Civil War and World War II--Torga was a staunch defender of human rights. His deep concern with these violent conflicts appears in some of his works, especially the multivolume Diário (Diary, 1941-1993). Although not officially linked to neorealism, which emerged in Portuguese literature in the 1940s, his work reveals certain characteristics of that trend, such as the denouncement of social injustices. He nonetheless maintained a distance from other literary vanguard movements of the epoch, including Surrealism. Torga produced a body of...
(read more)