This paper compares two accounts of Miguel Torga's first visit to Europe (in December 1937/ January 1938), as given in the 1939 and 1971 versions of A Criacao do Mundo - O Quarto Dia. It focuses on two central aspects that are inextricably linked: the self-staging of the narrative (evident in both texts, though more marked in the 1971 version) and the political dimension (presented more spontaneously and vehemently in the first version, and in a more constructed elaborate form in the second, with more attention given to places of European cultural memory). This double narrative is then compared with the brief notes on the same journey found in Diario I (1941). Facts from the writer's private life (now public knowledge) and from the political context of the time are also brought to bear upon certain notable omissions in the first three volumes of the diary (1941, 1943 and 1946): the absence of any allusion whatsoever to the Spanish civil war, and the author's near total silence on the question of the Second World War and the crimes committed by the Nazi regime.
