In this interview, Aharon Appelfeld guides us through the world of the writer’s visions – visions that he endeavours to translate with a great economy of words, seeking uncluttered accuracy rather than the profusion of metaphors. His deliberate renunciation of his German mother tongue, the fundamental importance that Yiddish has for him, and the adoption of Hebrew both as means of returning to the roots and as a secular language detached from the sacred language of biblical Hebrew, are all linguistic directions bearing internal images. Being careful not to be wasteful, not to be drawn into proliferation, results in a discretion of meaning. The blinding violence of clarity is nevertheless in the background.