In "Blind," what does the speaker mean by "He told her that the soul can transcend earthly life / If freed from the retina" in lines 10-11

What the speaker means in these lines is that reading goes beyond knowing how to read.

Explanation:

In the Poem Blind by Fatima Naoot, what the author means in these lines is that the important thing in a reading is not the fact of knowing how to read, but of knowing how to interpret.

And that it doesn't matter if she is blind, she has to see beyond the retina to be able to get out of "earthlylife", that is, to go beyond.

Even in a few lines later the author says "Reading does not require eyes" and refers precisely to those previous lines, because to read correctly you have to know how to make an interpretation, not just pronounce the words that are written in a text.