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The Mysterious Flame Of Queen Loana :: Эко Умберто
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Umberto Eco
The Mysterious Flame Of Queen Loana
English translation copyright © 2005 by Geoffrey Brock
Part One. THE INCIDENT
1. The Cruelest Month
"And what’s your name?"
"Wait, it’s on the tip of my tongue."
That is how it all began.
I felt as if I had awoke from a long sleep, and yet I was still suspended in a milky gray. Or else I was not awake, but dreaming. It was a strange dream, void of images, crowded with sounds. As if I could not see, but could hear voices that were telling me what I should have been seeing. And they were telling me that I could not see anything yet, only a haziness along the canals where the landscape dissolved. Bruges, I said to myself, I was in Bruges. Had I ever been to Bruges the Dead? Where fog hovers between the towers like incense dreaming? A gray city , sad as a tombstone with chrysanthemums , where mist hangs over the façades like tapestries.. .
My soul was wiping the streetcar windows so it could drown in the moving fog of the headlamps. Fog , my uncontaminated sister… A thick , opaque fog , which enveloped the noises and called up shapeless phantoms. .. Finally I came to a vast chasm and could see a colossal figure, wrapped in a shroud, its face the immaculate whiteness of snow. My name is Arthur Gordon Pym.
I was chewing fog. Phantoms were passing , brushing me , melting. Distant bulbs glimmered like will-o’-the-wisps in a graveyard …
Someone is walking by my side , noiselessly , as if in bare feet , walking without heels , without shoes , without sandals. A patch of fog grazes my cheek , a band of drunks is shouting down there , down by the ferry. The ferry? It is not me talking, it is the voices.
The fog comes on little cat feet… There was a fog that seemed to have taken the world away.
Yet every so often it was as if I had opened my eyes and were seeing flashes. I could hear voices: "Strictly speaking, Signora, it isn’t a coma… No, don’t think about flat encephalograms, for heaven’s sake… There’s reactivity…"
Someone was aiming a light into my eyes, but after the light it was dark again. I could feel the puncture of a needle, somewhere. "You see, there’s withdrawal…"
Maigret plunges into a fog so dense that he can’t even see where he’s stepping … The fog teems with human shapes , swarms with an intense , mysterious life.
Umberto Eco
The Mysterious Flame Of Queen Loana
English translation copyright © 2005 by Geoffrey Brock
Part One. THE INCIDENT
1. The Cruelest Month
"And what’s your name?"
"Wait, it’s on the tip of my tongue."
That is how it all began.
I felt as if I had awoke from a long sleep, and yet I was still suspended in a milky gray. Or else I was not awake, but dreaming. It was a strange dream, void of images, crowded with sounds. As if I could not see, but could hear voices that were telling me what I should have been seeing. And they were telling me that I could not see anything yet, only a haziness along the canals where the landscape dissolved. Bruges, I said to myself, I was in Bruges. Had I ever been to Bruges the Dead? Where fog hovers between the towers like incense dreaming? A gray city , sad as a tombstone with chrysanthemums , where mist hangs over the façades like tapestries.. .
My soul was wiping the streetcar windows so it could drown in the moving fog of the headlamps. Fog , my uncontaminated sister… A thick , opaque fog , which enveloped the noises and called up shapeless phantoms. .. Finally I came to a vast chasm and could see a colossal figure, wrapped in a shroud, its face the immaculate whiteness of snow. My name is Arthur Gordon Pym.
I was chewing fog. Phantoms were passing , brushing me , melting. Distant bulbs glimmered like will-o’-the-wisps in a graveyard …
Someone is walking by my side , noiselessly , as if in bare feet , walking without heels , without shoes , without sandals. A patch of fog grazes my cheek , a band of drunks is shouting down there , down by the ferry. The ferry? It is not me talking, it is the voices.
The fog comes on little cat feet… There was a fog that seemed to have taken the world away.
Yet every so often it was as if I had opened my eyes and were seeing flashes. I could hear voices: "Strictly speaking, Signora, it isn’t a coma… No, don’t think about flat encephalograms, for heaven’s sake… There’s reactivity…"
Someone was aiming a light into my eyes, but after the light it was dark again. I could feel the puncture of a needle, somewhere. "You see, there’s withdrawal…"
Maigret plunges into a fog so dense that he can’t even see where he’s stepping … The fog teems with human shapes , swarms with an intense , mysterious life.