Tales from the Mountain     by Miguel Torga, Translated by Ivana Carlsen Original title: Contos da Montanha & Novos Contos da Montanha Original language: Portuguese Country: Portugal   Published by QED Press Pub. Date: 1993 Format: Paperback, 160 pages Dimensions: (in inches): 0.51 x 8.50 x 5.51 ISBN: 0936609230 Edition: 1st USA Edition List Price: $12.99 Buy online from Amazon.com for $12.99

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Torga, twice nominated for the Nobel Prize was undoubtedly one of the great writers of our century. He once said ‘the universal is the local without walls’ and although his short stories are set in the rugged mountains of Trás-os-Montes in the Portuguese Northland they transcend narrow geography with their subject matter —— human beings and the emotions that drive them, the love and hatred, courage and fear, the greed and (sometimes) the generosity of spirit. Read singly the stories are striking, together the effect is stunning.

Although they could be classed as part of the literature of social protest they avoid the flat, proselytizing tone associated with some Portuguese Neo-Realist works. Torga wrote that four decades of an oppressive regime had disfigured the landscape of his country, in human as much as in physical terms. As a result of his critical stance he was arrested and imprisoned and his work banned. While he undoubtedly loved his homeland and respected its people, warts and all, he was far more ambivalent about the forces of law and authority, amongst whom he included the Church, although for a writer who rejected religion he used many religious images and symbols.

These Tales from the Mountain are told from the point of view of an omniscient ‘outside’ narrator. Given Torga’s own medical background, the obvious analogy is with the doctor who steps back to make a diagnosis and them comes forward with a cure. Compassion balances detachment and he doesn’t hesitate to present human conduct in all its ugliness as when the villagers burn Julião alive in the story The Leper. Torga doesn’t stand in judgment but leaves the reader to draw his own conclusions.

Much of Torga’s writing has a filmic quality and in fact The Leper was turned into a short film. His cinemaesque technique is seen too in the opening paragraphs of Fronteira with the frontier village silhouetted against a twilight sky and coming to life as darkness falls. The narrator is the eye of the camera, focusing on particular characters and events just as a director would select shots, angles and lighting set-ups. Torga alternates wide pans of village and mountains with close-ups of its inhabitants — a community of smugglers setting off on their clandestine business. He even ‘cuts’ back and forth between different individuals to reinforce the point that the village of Fronteira (= Frontier) is a collective protagonist, where the villagers act as one.

Fronteira has all the usual Torga ingredients; birth and death — through violence rather than old age — religious symbolism, healthy sexual desire and an underlying criticism of a society that does nothing to alleviate poverty and deprivation. There is also humour as when we see Isabel the smuggler-heroine of the piece looking more like a woman off to launder a load of nappies while the trigger-happy national guardsman Robalo, first described a mastiff on the prowl, dogged and persistent falls for her like a ton of bricks and ends up joining the bad guys himself.

Torga gives his characters an authentic voice, rendering popular speech with its proverbs and archaic rural usage. His great readability comes from showing the whole community, male and female, young and old, as characters transcending the stereotypical, formed and deformed by a harsh environment but often rising above it with courage and dignity.

‘Although Robalo was shy and aloof, on Sunday when he was off duty there was a fiesta at Fronteira, and he could not resist going near the good people of the village. There, right under his eyes, bathed by the golden light of the sun, was Isabel. Isabel! The girl took one’s breath away. Twenty-two years full of joy. Such arms... such legs... such breasts were delights to behold. Well, Robalo was the same age, and not exactly made of stone, so the wick caught fire, caught so strongly that by the end of the week Robalo was a changed man. His holier-than-thou air vanished, and he began to see Fronteira with different eyes.’ pp108-9