10/22/2025
October is Banned Books Month
Miguel Torga and Tales from the Mountain
Translated by Ivana Carlsen, NEA Translation Award Winner
(published by QED Press)
In 1991, we published Miguel Torga’s Tales from the Mountain, translated by Ivana Rangel Carlsen. It was an enormous undertaking and marvelous adventure for our little press. Ivana had been chosen by Torga as his preferred English translator. When she was very occasionally stumped by archaic or technical language, she would pass a word or phrase along to me for research. The World Wide Web hadn’t gone live yet and no one I knew owned a mobile phone, so research was a very different process from what we use these days. One short story, “The Hunter,” required hours of library research and many phone calls to finalize. Our press had recently shared a display space at a trade show with the publisher of Dances with Wolves, which was being shot on location in South Dakota. The publisher gave me the number of the black powder expert for the movie and he graciously confirmed the term “reloading press” and the process of making bullets in the days of black powder.
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. Torga writes with the passion of a casino player, and the truth of a child. 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. [Torga’s books were banned in Portugal until the 1974 revolution.] 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.
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.
Excerpts from Pat Odber’s article in Babel Guide to the Fiction of Portugal
Check out Tales from the Mountain - This is the first English edition of the prize-winning writings of Portugal's premiere writer, who has been nominated twice for the Nobel Prize for Literature. by Miguel Torga and Ivana Carlsen on Bookshop.org US!
