Claudio Magris: Blindly (excerpt in English)

Blindly

[…] but where are those shouts coming from, what an uproar, I can’t
hear a thing anymore, whose ear is this, deafened, stunned, out of order,
it must have been a wallop and if someone packed it, someone certainly
caught it, me or somebody else.
There, it’s over, the roaring is subsiding. That too was a rhetorical ques
tion; it’s my ear, this one here, seeing that you, Doctor Ulcigrai, are bend-
ing over the other one, the left one, when you ask me “So then your real
name is supposedly Jorgen and you say you wrote this”, showing me that
old tattered book that I found in that bookshop on Salamanca Place in
Hobart Town. At least you don’t raise your hand to me, on the contrary,
you’re very kind, you don’t take offence even when I call you Cogoi, and
you don’t keep on asking me the same questions over and over again. If I
don’t answer, you let it go, but the fact remains that you asked me and it’s
pointless because you already know the truth, or think you know it, which
is the same thing, and in any case you already know my answer, when I
answer you otherwise you suggest it to me, you put the words in my mouth.

Translated by Anne Milano Appel
(source: Vilenica Almanac 2009)