Jagiellonian University

Institute of English Studies

Paulina Święch

THOMAS HARDY'S STRATEGIES OF

REPRESENTATION, DIALECT AND LEGAL LANGUAGE
REPRESENTED THROUGH THE FREE INDIRECT
DISCOURSE IN POLISH TRANSLATION OF "ON THE
WESTERN CIRCUIT" WITH A COMMENTARY

Thesis presented in part fulfilment

of the requirements for the degree
of Master of Arts at
the Jagiellonian University of
Kraków
written under the supervision of
dr. hab. Andrzej Pawelec

Kraków 2021
 Uniwersytet Jagielloński

Instytut Filologii Angielskiej

Paulina Święch

STRATEGIE THOMASA HARDY'EGO W REPREZENTACJI

ŚWIATA PRZEDSTAWIONEGO, DIALEKT ORAZ JĘZYK
PRAWNICZY WYRAŻONY W MOWIE POZORNIE
ZALEŻNEJ W POLSKIM PRZEKŁADZIE "ON THE
WESTERN CIRCUIT" Z KOMENTARZEM

Praca napisana pod kierunkiem

dr. hab. Andrzeja Pawelca

Kraków 2021
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
Introduction.............................................................................................................................3
CHAPTER 1: About "On the Western Circuit" and Thomas Hardy: His Life, Ouvre and
Philosophical Views .....................................................................................................4

1.1 "On the Western Circuit:" textual history ..................................................................4

1.2 Life's Little Ironies .....................................................................................................4
1.3 "On the Western Circuit:" summary ..........................................................................4
1.4 Thomas Hardy: biography .........................................................................................5
1.5 "On the Western Circuit:" interpretation and analysis ...............................................10
1.6 Thomas Hardy's philosophical beliefs in the context of "On the Western Circuit"
...........................................................................................................................................16
CHAPTER 2: Syntax, Dialect and FID (Free Indirect Discourse) in "On the Western
Circuit"....................................................................................................................................19
2.1 Syntax and Style.........................................................................................................19
2.2 Dialect.........................................................................................................................24
2.2.1 Deixis in Dialect............................................................................................24
2.2.2 Dialect in "On the Western Circuit"..............................................................24
2.2.3 Berezowski's Procedures of Dialect Translation...........................................25
2.2.4 Pinto's Strategies of Linguistic Variation Translation...................................28
2.3 Free Indirect Discourse (FID).....................................................................................30
CHAPTER 3: Translation of Selected Fragments with a Commentary...............................32
Conclusion............................................................................................................................48
References.............................................................................................................................49
Appendix 1......................................................................................................................................52
INTRODUCTION

The first chapter comprises the life and creative work of Thomas Hardy, a summary, analysis
and interpretation of the short story within the context of the whole volume of Life's Little
Ironies, in which it appears, as well as the author's philosophical views that underlie "On the
Western Circuit." Impressive amount of Hardy's literary work contributed to the formation of
the writer's stylistic idiosyncrasy visible in the structure of "On the Western Circuit," which
additionally adds meaning to the text not on the lexically-semantic level but through the
syntactic plane of language. Dorset dialectal features, serving the role of social deixis, also
inform the readership of the particularly significant for the story's plot – resolving around
marriage and marital life – social relationships between the characters as well as their
socioeconomic ranks. Another, final aspect discussed in the second chapter of this thesis is
legal language, which not only discloses the perspective and mindset of the one of the main
protagonists to the reader but also continually, through the whole network of legal discourse,
invites the recipient to interpret the events as if happening in the court of law, and the whole
institution of marriage from the legal rather than romantic point of view. All these three latent
aspects that may be disregarded, overlooked or undermined in the process of translation turn
to be pivotal in the context of "On the Western Circuit," as meaning carrying units, and are
treated separately in the third practical chapter of this study with a commentary justifying the
relevant translating choices to be made with regard to the already mentioned three elements of
semantic significance: structure, dialect, and legalese exposed through the specific type of a
third-person narrative, FID.
CHAPTER 1

1. About "On the Western Circuit" and Thomas Hardy: His Life, Ouvre and Philosophical
Views

1.1 "On the Western Circuit:" textual history

Thomas Hardy wrote "On the Western Circuit" either in the second half of 1890 or in the beginning of
1891. The story's history of composition is most complex as Hardy made many alterations to the text
throughout its transmission. He revised the manuscript, a typescript, the two serial versions, the galley
proofs of 1894 and the 1912 Wessex edition. The most significant changes were the ones made for the
bowdlerized periodical versions. They were published in November 1891 in Harper's Weekly in the
US, and the next month in The English Illustrated Magazine. Of equal importance were also the
revisions introduced by Hardy in the story's next phase of transmission for the galley proofs of 1894,
the first collected edition of Life's Little Ironies, in which the author not only partially restored his
original conception of the story but also inserted some extra material to make the portrayal of passion
and sexual allusions contained in the manuscript even more explicit. The manuscript of this short story
was delivered to Manchester Central Public Library in 1911 (Ray 1997: 201-216).

1.2 Life's Little Ironies

The stories that constitute Life's Little Ironies were composed within a five-year period: "A Tragedy of
Two Ambitions" from 1888; "The Son's Veto," "For Conscience Sake," "On the Western Circuit," "To
Please his Wife" and "A Few Crusted Characters" from 1891; "An Imaginative Woman" and "The
Fiddler of the Reels" from 1893 (Wilson 2009: 375). The volume seems to show a consistency in a
choice of theme – all the stories to some extent address the problem of "failure of marriage as an
institution for formalizing and stabilizing sexual relationships, and the insidious effects of social
ambition on family life" (Brady 1982: 156). Marriage is portrayed as nothing short of a legal contract,
which fails to reflect the sexual choices made by the characters in the stories. The short stories in Life's
Little Ironies also share the same general theme of nineteenth-century men and women's inevitable
inability to build "creative and meaningful relationships with both the past and the future," and to
bring harmony into their chaotic existence (Gilmartin & Mengham 2007: 93). Only the ironic voice
that can be heard in the narration, which is present in all the stories of the volume, "can accommodate
what is both farcical and tragic about this perennial contradiction in the nature of life" (Brady 1982:
156).

1.3 "On the Western Circuit:" summary

Charles Bradford Raye, a young barrister from London, is currently on his western circuit of assize
courts. At a town fair in Melchester he meets a beautiful country girl, Anna. Raye seduces her and
after several meetings with the girl wins her "body and soul." When he comes back to London, he
writes her a letter. Being an illiterate and uneducated girl raised on the Great Mid-Wessex Plain, Anna
turns for help in writing to Edith Harnham, the lonely and childless wife of a wine merchant, who
trains the peasant girl as a servant in her household. Mrs Harnham's feelings for the young man that
have been ignited earlier, during the feast, when, by mistake, seeking Anna's hand, Raye "playfully
slipped two of his fingers inside her glove," now become so involved that she starts to write for Anna
independently. As the correspondence continues, Raye's love is growing. The barrister is so enchanted
by the tenderly and sensible manner of Mrs Harnham's writing that, when he learns the girl is
pregnant, he decides to marry her, convinced that his career would not suffer as a result of this
commitment. When her protégé is forced to leave the country, Lady Harnham writes Raye passionate
letters in her absence, wishing she were in Anna's position. Edith accompanies Anna to London, where
the marriage takes place. Shortly after, Raye discovers the truth only to realise that though legally, he
is married to the country girl, spiritually, he is in love with Lady Harnham. After he kisses Edith
goodbye, he parts with his wife for their honeymoon. Ruined by this legal contract, Raye finds his
only relief in re-reading "all those sweet letters" to him that were signed "Anna."

1. 4 Thomas Hardy: biography

Thomas Hardy was born on 2 June 1940 at 8 a.m. in Upper (Higher) Bockhampton, a hamlet in the
parish of Stinsford, near Dorchester, Dorset. Born prematurely, dead, he was rescued by the midwife
and remained physically very week throughout his early years. England at the time of his birth was
deep into the tumultuous transformations of the Industrial Revolution, which brought national progress
and change. However, human life in the Dorset countryside back then remained changeless, and locals
who lived in the village located at the southwest of the island seemed to be affected neither by history
nor technology. Hardy's grandfather, Thomas the First, for whom the cottage at Bockhampton had
been built, worked as a mason and builder. He also was a volunteer during the Napoleonic wars and a
church musician. He died before Hardy was born, but his wife, Mary, managed to teach her grandson
history and awaken his interest in the past by telling him numerous stories on the war against
Napoleon, local customs, superstitions and supernatural events until her death in 1957. For nearly a
century the Hardys had also played for the church – his father was a member of the Stinsford Parish
choir, and his grandfather played in a neighbouring church band. This certainly awakened in the young
Thomas, who followed their steps and played as a fiddler at the local weddings, a great passion for
music and dance. On 22 December 1839 Hardy's father, Thomas the Second, married Jemina Hardy,
née Hand, a cook to the vicar of Stinsford. The daughter of irreligious, violent drunkard, Hardy's
mother was an intelligent, ambitious and unusually well-read woman. Hardy's mother was convinced
that her son was destined to bring some meaning upon the world, and feeling her husband was failing
to stand the challenge, she strived to provide the best education for her son and incited in Hardy
admiration for books, offering him such lectures to read as Dryden's Virgil, Johnson's Rasselas and
Bernardin de Saint-Pierre's Paul and Virginia. Thomas was the eldest brother to Mary, Henry and
Katherine. The sisters went to Salisbury Training College to qualify as teachers at the Dorchester
Girls' National School.

In 1848, Hardy joined the newly established, on the initiative of the Stinsford's vicar, Arthur
Shirley and Julia Augusta Martin, National School in Upper Bockhampton, and soon became the
lady's favourite. However, in 1850 the ambitious mother transferred Hardy to the British and Foreign
Bible Society School in Dorchester, hearing that its headmaster, Isaac Last, was a pre-eminent Latin
teacher. The facility, just after Hardy's enrolment, was advanced to the rank of academy. Being
introduced to the violin in his early teens, Hardy joined the Stinsford string band and earned an
opinion of a highly acclaimed violinist. During this period he also taught in the Sunday School.
Throughout his whole childhood Thomas was exposed to the tradition of story telling. Raised in a
family atmosphere filled with love and tranquillity, the scholar spent his country life at home, which
was steeped in folklore, local customs, traditions and superstitions.

At sixteen, in 1856, Hardy left school and was apprenticed to the Dorchester architect John Hicks.
These several years of apprenticeship was the time of Hardy's auto-didacticism, he began to study
Greek. At this period he also became absorbed in church architecture and had opportunity to befriend
two well-educated individuals who proved decisive both to his literary work and intellectual life. The
first one was living in the close neighbourhood of Hick's office, where he conducted his school, the
Reverend William Barnes, a dialect poet, philologist from Dorset. The first poet Hardy ever got
acquainted with, who wrote about the rustic life, became later an artistic model for Thomas. Even
more influential figure in Hardy's life was another fine scholar, Horace Moule, son of the vicar of
Fordington. The black sheep of the Anglican family presented Hardy to some ideas of modern
thought, particularly the Higher Criticism, but most importantly, he encouraged Thomas in his poetry
writing and introduced him to some powerful reading and groundbreaking scientific works such as
Darwinian The Origin of Species and Essays and Reviews by a group of dissident churchmen called
"The Seven against Christ." Thanks to Moule Hardy also got acquainted with some of the most
prominent philosophical ideas of that time through the works of the two great French thinkers:
Auguste Comte, who was the first to define the positivist position to sociology, and Charles Fourier,
one of the founders of utopian socialism. During his architectural training Hardy also began his
literary career and started writing poetry, including "Domicilium," Hardy's earliest known poem. In
1856, he started to contribute to the Dorset County Chronicle, which published his articles on
architecture. He wrote also some essays on Lamb and Tennyson. For financial and social reasons,
Hardy never acquired his university education.

Depressed and in search for his sense of direction, in 1862, Hardy left Dorset for London to work
as an architect in the offices of Arthur Bloomfield. These valuable five years were time of self-
education, reading Greek tragedians, and of both educational and recreational activities such as
attending lectures and galleries. It was also during these years in London that Hardy went through
religious crisis. In part responsible for that was the scholar's extensive reading of Darwin, Spencer,
Huxley and John Stuart Mill; with a view to finding the truth about God, man and nature, which
proved highly damaging to his faith, and filled Hardy with an undercurrent of scepticism. As far as his
architectural career was concerned, Hardy's literary work won him many prizes, the Royal Institute of
British Architects prize and the sir William Tite Prize. However, this time spent in London was also
the time when he decided to abandon his architectural studies for his pursuit in literary endeavours and
finding a long-term employment as a writer. Particularly, he wished to be a poet and became entirely
absorbed in reading verse. He read the poems of Shelley, Browning, Scott and Swinburne. As Hardy
stated in his autobiography, his earliest attempts at publishing some of his works, including poems,
and sending them to magazines had started by 1866 and were unsuccessful, with much of his writings
destroyed. What proved to be a turning point in Hardy's career was a publication of his article titled
"How I Built Myself a House" in March 1865 by Chamber's Journal. Though decisive for his career
as a writer, fruitful and full of opportunities, these days spent in London were not days of happiness
for Thomas Hardy. Partly responsible for that might have been Hardy's problems in forming
relationships with the opposite sex. In particular, his bittersweet affair with a lady's maid, Eliza Bright
Nicholls, which ended in a heartbreak, bringing much grief upon Hardy, which was even reflected in
some of his poems.

Desolate, mentally disturbed and physically ill, Hardy returned to Dorset in July 1867 to find
employment again at Mr Hicks, who needed the assistance with church-restoration. At this time, he
also started another relationship, with his sixteen-year old cousin, Tryphena Sparks, which lasted
about three years. Soon after his arrival, he undertook the task of writing his first novel, The Poor Man
and the Lady. Hardy completed the manuscript and submitted it to various publishers in 1868 only to
receive a negative answer, partly due to its satirical tone as well as the presence of Hardy's Radical
views he once held. This autobiographical novel, of which the full text has not been preserved, was
inspired by Hardy's earlier stay in London and its impressions on the writer, as compared to what he
had already experienced during his rural life. It contrasts the fashionable cosmopolitan life in the
metropolitical city and its trivialities with the naturalness of the provincial life in the country.
Following the advice of George Meredith, a publisher's reader, Thomas abandoned his plans for
publishing The Poor Man and the Lady and started writing more popular and sensational fiction with a
more complex plot in Weymouth, where after the death of John Hicks, he started to work for the
architect G.R. Crickmay. The novel entitled Desperate Remedies exploiting much of the manuscript of
Hardy's previous work was published the next year in March. In 1870, he was also commissioned by
Crickmay to plan a restoration project for the church in St Juliot in Cornwall, where he met the rector's
sister-in-law, who, in 1874, became his wife. Emma Lavinia Gifford, a remarkably lively, energetic
woman of the same age as Hardy, and interested in books, soon instilled in the writer a deep affection.

Also in 1870, Hardy quit working for Crickmay and set out for London, where he found
employment, designing for Arthur Bloomfield and Raphael Brandon, and where his first accepted
novel was published. Over a year after, Hardy's second novel Under the Greenwood Tree, of which
most was composed back in Cornwall, was published. Later the same year the first instalment of
another novel entitled A Pair of Blue Eyes appeared in Tinsley's Magazine. However, it was only after
he was invited by Leslie Stephen to contribute to the prestigious Cornhill the first serialisation of his
fourth published novel Far From the Madding Crowd, when his career as a writer provided enough
financial stability to relinquish his architectural jobs. Of Hardy's first written novels, The Poor Man
and the Lady, Desperate Remedies and A Pair of Blue Eyes are considered less triumphant to far more
refined in style masterpieces such as Under the Greenwood Tree, praising the qualities of an
"unspoiled" village; Far from the Madding Crowd, applauding farm life and its healing and
reinvigorating aspects; and The Return of the Native, bringing out enduringness of the heath. The year
of 1874, in which Hardy completed his remarkable literary achievement, Far from the Madding
Crowd, was also the year that marked transition in the scholar's lifestyle when he chose urban life over
the rural country of his birth. This change also meant Hardy's admission into intellectual elite. After
the suicide of his longtime companion and mentor, Horace Moule, in September this year, Hardy was
becoming surrounded by many honorary figures such as the man of letters, philosopher and literary
critic, Stephen Leslie, whose company had enjoyed his late aristocratic friend. Invited by the Cornhill
Magazine editor to contribute another serial for the paper, Hardy began The Hand of Ethelberta.
Considered unsuccessful, this experimental novel was a product of the criticism Hardy had received
regarding his previous serialisation, as an author of only pastoral fiction and too heavily inspired in his
writing by the style of George Eliot.

In 1876, the Hardys went to Sturminster Newton to move into their first own house, Riverside
Villa. Despite all their marital problems aggravated in part by their failure to produce a child, the
couple was to spend there what Hardy himself described as "happiest time". Sturminster Newton, at
which Hardy had his idyllic stay, was also the place where his next literary masterpiece, The Return of
the Native was largely conceived. After being rejected by The Cornhill and the editors of other
magazines, the novel was finally accepted by Andrew Chatto and published in 1878 in monthly
instalments in The Belgravia.

In 1878, Hardy and Emma moved to Tooting to live closer to London. At this time, Hardy became
friends with many prominent literary figures and publishers like Alexander Macmillan. He met Robert
Browning, Matthew Arnold and Alfred Tennyson, and was elected a member of the Savile Club and
the Rabelais Club. Thomas also enjoyed visits to the city's theatres, concerts and galleries. In
preparation of the historical background for his next novel, The Trumpet-Major, which began
serialisation in 1880, the writer did much of his research on the Napoleonic period in the library of the
British Museum. Hardy started working on his next novel, A Laodicean, when his American publisher,
Harper, asked him to contribute a serial, which was to be published in the first number of the European
Edition of Harper's New Monthly. During this period Hardy's health deteriorated, and after the couple
returned from their holiday in northern France, Thomas was diagnosed with severe internal bleeding.
The novel which was for the most part dictated to Emma and dismissed by some critics as a failure
shows detrimental effect of Hardy's bad health condition.

In the summer of 1881 the couple moved to live in a place not far from his parent's home,
Wimborne, which became the setting for his new novel, Two on a Tower. The romance about the love
of an older, married woman for a much younger man, set in the context of the stellar universe was
serialised from May 1882 in the Atlantic Monthly. Concerned about the predicament of the
Dosrsetshire rural working class, Hardy contributed an essay to Longman's Magazine in 1883. The
author of "The Dorsetshire Labourer" criticised the prevailing ideology dismissing poor country
labourers, the stereotypical approach to countrymen as "Hodges," and harmful effects of frequent
migrations and home ownership.

Fully recovered and financially comfortable, the Hardys moved in 1883 to Dorchester with a view
to building there their own home. In October of the same year, he purchased a plot of land that was
about two miles away from his family home, at the outskirt of the town, on the Wareham Road. Max
Gate, as the mansion was named, a project of Hardy's own design, was finished in two years, and the
couple moved into their new house in June 1885. Hardy chose this place for the location of his next
novel, The Mayor of Casterbridge, in which the writer drew upon the Roman scenery of the Romano-
British urns and skeletons found by the workmen digging the well at Max Gate. The novel which first
appeared in a weekly serial publication in 1886, takes place in the time of Hardy's childhood and
exploits the theme of the rise of the underdog in the social hierarchy. Almost each spring and summer
Hardy also went to London for the Season, in order to meet with some of his old friends, while
attending private dinners, but also to make acquaintances with new ones, especially: the American
novelist, W. D. Howells, Walter Pater, Lord Lytton, J. R. Lowell, Henry James, Leslie Stephen,
Browning, Matthew Arnold and Oscar Wilde.

Soon after he finished his eleventh published novel focusing on the clash between town and
country values in 1887, The Woodlanders, The Hardys set off for their journey to Italy, visiting Genoa,
Florence, Rome, Venice and Milan. When Hardy was commissioned to write his next novel, he
postponed planning what is now considered his lifetime's work, Tess of the d'Urbevilles, and instead
brought out his first volume of short stories called Wessex Tales, and was working on another
collection, A Group of Noble Dames. The latter, unlike Wessex Tales, describing ordinary people
living in the recent past, portrays the lives of aristocratic ladies of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries. The publication history behind the novel addressing women and the double sexual standard
consists of a series of modifications and cuts. By some critics regarded as too sordid, Tess of the
d'Urbevilles was refused by two publishers before its bowdlerized serial version finally appeared in
The Graphic in 1891. The last novel together with his next masterpiece, Jude the Obscure, which
Hardy began writing in 1893, were selling well enough to free the author from any financial worry so
that he could turn to poetry. Also in the interval between Tess of the d'Urbevilles and Jude the
Obscure, another novel, The Well-Beloved, considered highly autobiographical and experimental, was
written and published after five years, in 1897.

Together with the popularity which the novels brought, came financial stability, social encounters
and increased fame, also among the female readership, which only exacerbated the couple's marital
difficulties. With the death of Hardy's father on 20 July 1892 the spouses grew more and more apart.
Younger and beautiful women such as Rosamund Tomson, Florence Henniker or later also Agnes
Grove, were becoming attracted to the married and famous writer. With Tomson, who turned out to be
only exploiting him, the author exchanged some poems and shared a couple of flirtatious letters. With
the second lady much more serious romantic story was related. Named after her godmother, Florence
Nightingale, she was the daughter of the first Lord Houghton and wife of a Major-General. When they
first met in Dublin in 1893 at the invitation of her brother, Hardy was charmed. She reciprocated his
interest due to her passions in literature and writing, hoping he would advance her literary career.
Hardy offered Mrs Henniker some literary advice and a tour to architecture. He even collaborated with
her on a short story, "The Spectre of the Real." Apart from the writer's liaisons, different views on
women's emancipation as well as religion also brought Hardy and Emma apart. In the meantime, after
the success of his two books of short stories, in 1894, he collected another nine, undertaken three years
later, and published them with the title Life's Little Ironies. The volume was ordered for four reprints
in a three-month span, turning out to be a great success. Before Hardy's final transition to poetry, the
publication in 1895 of Jude the Obscure, the novel on unfulfilled ambitions for higher learning,
kinship and marital love, caused Hardy not only public criticism but also domestic strains, which he
endured ending up depressed and mentally unstable. This is particularly visible in the poems from this
period of 1895 and 1896: "In Tenebris" and "Wessex Heights."

After he recovered and made trips with his wife to Belgium and Switzerland, Hardy started going
over his older poems from the 1860s and writing new ones with a view to putting together his first
collection of poetry, Wessex Poems, for which publication in 1898 he supplied his own illustrations.
The bad reviews he obtained for his previous collection didn't deter the poet, and after the end of the
Boer War and the Act of Union uniting Great Britain and Ireland, a further volume of poetry appeared
in November 1901. The less idiosyncratic Poems of the Past and the Present comprises verses that
treat such subjects as philosophy, the universe, God, or the First Cause, Nature and the suffering of
animals, and the love for the women he met in his life. The first edition of 500 copies sold out
immediately, bringing good reviews. Not only was there a great interest in Hardy as a poet but also as
a prose writer with his topography of fictional Wessex acquiring more and more enthusiasts and
earning him the reputation of a Wessex novelist. He exploited the commercial value of this and his
lately transferred from Harper Brothers to Macmillan books, started to increasingly sell under such
titles as Wessex Tales, the Wessex Novels and the Wessex Edition.

In 1902, Hardy went about The Dynasts to publish the novel in three parts, successively in 1904,
1906 and 1908. On the work that took its author the longest time both in terms of its composition as
well as preparation Hardy had begun working already 40 years earlier by doing his research on
Napoleonic Wars with Moule and by acquiring and examining his grandmother's recollection of it. It is
the chronicle of the Wessex world in the Napoleonic period set against the workings of a nonhuman,
nondivine cosmological force in accordance with the Hardy's philosophy of the Immanent Will.

The death of Jemina Hardy in April 1904 came with a grievous loss to her son, with whom she had
been always close. In August 1905, in a respond to a letter he received from a young journalist with
the invitation for an interview, he met his second wife, Florence Emily Dugdale, at Max Gate next
year. Miss Dugdale was in her twenties but she admired Hardy's work, and he sought to promote her
literary career. Their relationship was developing – he sent her two photographs of himself and shortly
afterwards she was even doing some research in the British Museum he used to write Part III of The
Dynasts.

In 1905, Hardy received the first honorary degree of LL. D. at Aberdeen University. Another
literary degrees were yet to be granted to him by the universities of Oxford, Cambridge, St Andrews
and Bristol. Many honours were conferred on Hardy in the following years. After he turned down the
offer of a knighthood in 1908, he was elected president of the Society of Authors in 1909, and a year
after that, a member of the Order of Merit. In 1912, W. B. Yeats together with Henry Newbolt arrived
at Max Gate to personally award him with the Gold Medal of the Royal Society of Literature. While
his relationship with Florence was flourishing during their numerous meetings and visits at Max Gate,
his relationship with Emma was steadily deteriorating. With time, Florence became almost a member
of a household, often typing the works at Hardy's dictation, whereas Emma moved to the bedroom in
the attic. As the situation at home was becoming more tensed, Hardy's frustrations and depressive
mood started to show also in his third book of verse, Time's Laughingstocks, but so his new affair.
After Emma's mental condition got worse, heart problems also started bothering her. She died due to
impacted gallstones and heart failure on 27 November 1912.

In 1913, Macmillan published Hardy's last book of fiction, A Changed Man, which comprised
twelve stories. Hardy remarried in 1914 but the feelings of remorse and grief of the mourning
husband, present in two of his three sections of his newly collected volume, Satires of Circumstance,
published two years after Emma's death, caused much distress to Florence Emily Hardy. Another work
commemorating Emma and relating to her life and death consists also of some poems written in
memory of Hardy's late sister, Mary. Written after the outbreak of the First World War, Moments of
Vision appeared only three years after his previous volume of poetry, in November 1917, and it
included also a group of poems titled "Poems of War and Patriotism." Another pivotal literary
composition that began about the time of the publication of Moments of Vision was autobiographical
The Life of Thomas Hardy typed up by Florence at Hardy's dictation. His sixth book of verse, Late
Lyrics and Earlier, that was published in 1922 is distinguished by its seven-page commentary of his
own writing. "The Apology" was composed at the time when the author was ill and wrongly diagnosed
with cancer. Later in the year appeared the publication of Hardy's poetic drama, The Famous Tragedy
of the Queen of Cornwall. Also in 1923, the Hardys were hosting a lunch for the Prince of Wales at
Max Gate. Visitors to his dwellings were unceasing, some of them, as the most prominent
personalities, included: Virginia Wolf, James Barrie, Henry Newbolt, Edmund Gosse, H.G. Wells,
W.B. Yeats, George Bernard Shaw, Rudyard Kipling, T.E. Lawrence, Robert Graves, John
Galsworthy and many others. In respond to constantly arriving requests from for poems, from editors,
another volume of verse appeared, Human Shows, Far Phantasies, Songs and Trifles, in an edition of
5000 copies, of which almost all sold out before its publication in 1925.

Towards the end of 1927, his physical health started to decline rapidly to the point that he was
unable to write. Before, however, he managed that same year to gather all his short stories for a
collected edition and put together his new and old poems for his final, eighth book of verse, elegiac
Winter Words, which appeared posthumously in 1928. In the evening of the 11th of January 1928,
Hardy had a sharp heart attack and died shortly afterwards. His heart was interred in Emma's grave,
among the Hardy tombs, in Stinsford churchyard, whilst his ashes were buried in Westminster Abbey.

1. 5 "On the Western Circuit:" interpretation and analysis

"I was only the amanuensis (...) I was chosen on account of my tender years – because I could write,
and read the replies, yet couldn't understand," said Hardy when interviewed about his experience on
writing letters for the young girls in Dorchester, addressed to their sweethearts serving as soldiers in
India (Hardy 1999: 67). These autobiographical elements of the story do not entail the role played by
one of the main characters in "On the Western Circuit," who not only, contrarily to what she assures,
does not assume "mechanical passiveness," inserting her deepest feelings into the correspondence, but
also understands, too well perhaps, the tender replies from the person who is not her lover.

In accordance with one interpretation of the short story, as offered and supported by Brady, the
farce of circumstances which underlies "On the Western Circuit" is intertwined with the tragedy
encompassing seriousness of implications in the lives of characters that follows from this comic course
of events. In the vein of Shaw and Ibsen's drama, this irony manifests itself in the duality of the
reader's reactions – their laughter is in constant tension with their sympathetic concern for the main
characters. Yet another type of irony, "irony of form," is also provided by "On the Western Circuit,"
and is evinced in the apparent contradictory relation between the formally conventional aspect of the
genre's characteristic pattern of events and motives incorporated by the author, and thematically
unconventional aspect of the short story. Thus the classical plot of a well-made short story serves as a
vehicle for expressing unconventional idea, namely people's inability to remain aware of one's own
character, feelings and capabilities; their inability to be honest towards one other while making sexual
decisions; and failure of all legal contracts in truthful representation of those types of decisions (Brady
1982: 120-128). Another irony underlying the story is presented in the fact that of all disciplines, the
man falling into an unfortunate marital contract that is about to ruin him socially and professionally
has chosen to become a lawyer whose job consists in preparing and breaking such legal contracts
(http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/hardy/35years.html).

The three main characters in the story and the situation in which they find themselves are highly
stereotypical but their motivations and emotions develop throughout the story and are individually and
thoroughly examined. The development is also shown in the character's expectations, fantasies and
sexual desires, as they are formed and repressed by their adjustment to social and intellectual norms
with regards to class, wealth, tastes, skills, mannerisms, etc., as well as to "pre-existing discursive
conventions" (Koehler 2016: 196). The characters' perception of one another is distorted by their own
stereotypical image of perfection they have created and assigned to others: the ideal of rural beauty
seen in Anna, the high social standing of an urban gentleman, in which Anna strongly believes, and
spiritual connection with Raye, Edith holds to have (Brady 1982: 121). Raye keeps deluding himself,
stating: "She writes very prettily, doesn't she, thanks to these elementary schools?," disregarding the
fact that the level of education at the National Schools is too low to provide anyone with such good
writing skills. Self-deception in the character's behaviour strikes even more when, instead of realising
that the childish girl whom he had known two days could not possibly have been the author of the
letters that express "the deepest sensibilities," praising the country beauty, he makes a life choice of
paramount importance, mesmerised by the power of the text
(http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/hardy/35years.html). Unlike the readers who have the clearer
vision of the protagonists, the characters choose to be ignorant of one another's flaws and facts that
could sully their impeccable views of the others. Raye risks all his life, basing on the wrong
assumption that the correspondence reflects Anna's true nature, Edith falls in love with Raye,
neglecting his frivolous approach to life and his plans of taking advantage of a young and naive girl to
satisfy his passion. Raye idealises all that is absent in his urban and monotonous life of an educated
intellectual – all that is represented by the naive, eager, light-hearted rural girl (Brady 1982: 121-122).
Raye's fascination with Anna's naturalness and spontaneity is contradicted by his appreciation of
Edith's sophisticated taste and education, and thus his "adherence to a conventional middle-class
system of values," is only indicative of his lack of self-knowledge (Kempf 2010: 109). Even when
Raye finds out the truth that ruins his perfect image of a country beauty who is "capable of expressing
the deepest sensibilities in the simplest words" and of doing so with intelligence, he creates another
false vision of his primary object of desire, this time degrading her to an "unlettered peasant." The
steam circus at the feast turns the protagonists' steady and orderly world into "an undulating, dazzling,
lurid universe," in which the perceptions and identities of one another become distorted and blurred.
"The unfledged maid-servant" is once "a fascinating child of nature" and the other time just an
"unlettered peasant." Raye from being "no great man, in any sense" becomes "so gentlemanly, so
fascinating" and "well-bred and chivalrous" (Koehler 2016: 189). The riders in "On the Western
Circuit" moved by the machinery of steam roundabouts are described as "throbbing humanity." Such
presentation of the protagonists "in terms of palpitations, vibrations, trembling and flushes" is
common for Hardy's characters in his fiction as a whole, and, as Asquith suggests, symbolises their
"emotional turmoil" (Asquith 2013: 288).

Brady also offers an interesting interpretation of the short story's opening scenes. The part that
describes Melchester Fair, the place at which Raye's courtship leading to his marriage with Anna is
about to start, contains reference to Dante's eighth chasm of Inferno. In Alighieri's drama, this part of
hell is destined for those who have committed fraud. This allusion is what foreshadows all the
deceptive actions which the characters undertake in an egoistic pursuit of their desires and goals,
which ultimately lead to the legal union between two people of completely different backgrounds. It is
fraud committed by all three characters what underlies Raye and Anna's marriage and what may be
further considered as a prerequisite for nearly every legal contract. Raye, driven by his sexual needs,
entices the innocent girl into giving him her "body and soul," allowing her at the same time to believe
and hope for their future commitment. Anna's deceit is the most direct one, as she misleads her
correspondent by pretending to be a different person. Edith is no less guilty of fraud, not only by
agreeing to her maiden's deceitful plan but also by taking pleasure in the correspondence while
pretending to write solely out of her concern for the illiterate girl. She indulges herself so deeply in
this act of "luxury" to the point that she even sends some of the letters without consulting it first with
the person whose name she uses as a signature. Edith too, has become a victim of fraud when her
parents deceived her into believing that the married life, though with no love, is better than a life of a
spinster, and advised for marrying the emotionally detached elderly wine-merchant (Brady 1982: 127).
Still, knowing the bitterness of a bad marriage and its fatal effects, she lets that happen both to her
charge, whom she treats like a daughter, and the one to whom image "she had become possessed to the
bottom of her soul."

The fraudulent behaviour of Edith Harnham is not limited towards the other characters in the story
but is also displayed to herself. As Brady claims, in assuming the role of her mistress, Edith strives to
recapture the youth she has lost while becoming married at the age of twenty seven. When the truth is
revealed to the mistress about Anna's pregnancy, Edith may even "attempt to transfer her emotional
sensibility onto the person and circumstances of her young maid," who expects a child, also due to her
desire to become a parent herself. The strength of bond she has formed with the girl, which proves she
craves emotional intimacy, is visible when, after Anna's departure, she lies into her bed, unable to
withstand the profound silence that pervaded the house. All in all, Edith as an early and unhappily
married woman in her "appropriation of Anna's position and identity" may however seem more
excusable in the eyes of the reader who symphatises with the lonely and childless wife (Brady 1982:
124).

The interpretation of such blurring between the lines of the mistress and her maid's separateness is
also supported by the illustrations attached to the periodical origins of the story. Before the Hardy's
story was published in the volume Life's Little Ironies, it appeared periodically in The English
Illustrated Magazine. In this edition, "On the Western Circuit" was supplied with the four lithographic
illustrations made by Wal Paget. One illustration (see Appendix 1) depicts a woman sitting at a writing
desk with her head leaning on her hand put on the back of a chair, as if she was trying to hold back her
tears in her tragic infatuation with the man "to whom she was hardly so much as a name."
Significantly, in this picture, inserted under the Edith's lines: "'I wish he was mine!', she murmured,"
which portrays Lady Harnham, the reader can quite easily mistake the distinguished matron for her
maid because of her hidden face as well as her clothes which are reminiscent of those worn by a
servant: a black dress and a cap. This ambiguity might be deliberately created by Paget to suggest that
"the two women become extensions of each other," as Raye during the correspondence is wooing
Anna with regard to the aspects of her appearance he finds attractive, but as regards mental and
emotional connection the lawyer formed with Edith, being led on by her in letters, he is tempted with
the idea of getting married not with the young sweet rural girl but with her sophisticated and educated
mistress. The writing desk at which Edith sits is of particular importance here, as it serves as a bridge
connecting the identities of the two women. Through the epistolary tradition of the nineteenth-century
England's society, the misalliance between the wealthy upper-middle-class intellectual living in
London and the poor illiterate girl born and raised in a small village of the Great Mid-Wessex
(Salisbury) Plain is enabled. Vast gaps between the characters' social and geographical positions are
bridged together by the developing Penny Post they use while exchanging their romantic discourse
(http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/hardy/35years.html).

There exist discrepancy between the form of expression, the simple phraseology, Harnham uses in
her letters and the brightness of ideas employed in the correspondence. Harnham carefully makes sure
in her deception of Raye that her thoughts are "lowered to monosyllabic phraseology" to keep up her
disguise as a lower-class rural girl and not to raise any suspicions in the Londoner. Thus Raye's
surprise at the natural and free style of writing. Harnham not only makes a pretence with regards to the
linguistic aspects of the correspondence, but also her stationary and its colour, as material markers of
social status, do not undermine the illusion that the letters are written by a lower-class rural maid.
Even though the kind of education provided by the National Schools would have made Anna fully
literate and capable of producing the most amatory letters, her ideas still would be nothing more
elaborate than those "of a goose." Nevertheless, Raye steers clear of suspicion.

Such complementary relationship that exists between the two women is also noted by Karin
Koehler in Thomas Hardy and Victorian Communication: Letters, Telegrams and Postal Systems. As
she claims, it is neither Anna nor Edith that Raye falls in love with, but "an epistolary persona that
amalgamates both women's traits." This idealistic image of woman Raye builds up is based and
enabled by the correspondence and the illusions correspondents create of one another. The refinement
of Edith's "own impassioned and pent-up ideas" or "foisted-in sentiments, to which the young barrister
mainly responded" are effective and appealing to Raye only when in combination with Anna's
simplicity of "monosyllabic phraseology" and plainness of her "humble note-paper." Knowing the
maid-servant's natural style was not shaped in accordance with conventional middle-class teachings,
Raye is fascinated by his correspondent's taste, which she must have been born with. Sophistication
with which Edith expresses herself in letters overwhelms the addressee only because of his previously
formed image of Anna as "an artless creature" which he keeps in mind while marvelling at Edith's
"pretty poetical" style of writing (Koehler 2016: 192). While reading the letter, the lawyer does not
evaluate the language used in it on its own but with regard to the whole image of the supposed writer,
which he remembered: "the language (...) so purely that of a young girl." Summing up, "through its
portrayal of epistolary correspondence, the story suggests that people fall in love not so much in with
another person, but with images arising out of their own needs and desires" (Koehler 2016: 195). Yet
another scholar studying Hardy's stories implies such existing complementarity between Anna and
Edith. Plotz even goes as far as to regard this sort of relation as a "'body and soul' separation," Edith
becoming Anna's soul, as she wins Raye over with her love letters (Plotz 1996: 382).

In "On the Western Circuit," contrarily to what was commonly believed at the time of Hardy and
his contemporaries, the letter is proven to fail in both its roles – as an unreliable mode of exchange as
well as inadequate form of self-expression. The person to whom the letter is addressed may not
coincide with the one who responds to it or even with the one who actually reads it. Illiteracy of the
correspondent, on the other hand, renders expressing one's own private thoughts and emotions
impossible. In negating those broadly accepted convictions about the epistolary communication,
Hardy debunks the stereotypical portrayal of romantic love as an inexorable and integral part of either
marital or sexual relationships (Koehler 2017: 85). Neither of the marriages presented in the story has
love as its fundament, but the characters enter into marital contracts either to conform to the social
norms or, as in the case of Raye and Anna, because of the initial lust on one part and deception on the
other. As Gilmartin and Mengham incisively remark, not only the letter as a form of communication is
proven unreliable in this piece of "anti-epistolary fiction," as Koehler appropriately calls "On the
Western Circuit," but language in general (Koehler 2016: 187). The narrator's shiftiness makes the
reader question the reliability of the language of the narration of the story. They can be obtrusive,
when the narrator, assuming the reader's arrival at wrong conclusions, needs to implicitly direct the
reader at the right interpretation. This narrational intervention is achieved for instance by employing
parenthesis, as in "The man who played the disturbing part in the two quiet feminine lives hereunder
depicted – no great man, in any sense, by the way – first had knowledge of them on an October
evening, in the city of Melchester;" or "Unreserved – too unreserved by nature, she was not
experienced enough to be reserved by art." In another fragment in which the narrator intervenes, this
time by anticipating the meeting of Anna and Raye, the narration is filled with pessimism and
cynicism that reflect the narrator's attitude to love and life:

Each time that she approached the half of her orbit that lay nearest him they gazed at each other with
smiles, and with that unmistakable expression which means so little at the moment, yet so often leads up
to passion, heartache, union, disunion, devotion, overpopulation, drudgery, content, resignation, despair.

The narrator momentarily can be judgmental towards the characters, commenting on their behaviour
with a note of disdain, as when questioning Anna's ability to speak English correctly, even when she
cannot write it: "in which accomplishment Anna showed considerable readiness, as is not unusual with
the illiterate." At some points the narrator chooses to remain evasive or puzzling: "whether an inkling
of Anna's circumstances reached the knowledge of Mrs Harnham's husband or not cannot be said." To
conclude, a "chameleon-like narrator" is unpredictable, at times becoming obtrusive, pessimistic,
cynical, patronising or mysterious (Gilmartin & Mengham 2007: 103-104).

In the interpretation supplied by Gilmartin and Mengham some parallel truths are pointed out
which are indispensable in discovering the wholeness that lies beyond Hardy's great works of
literature. The rural girl's inability to read and write is paralleled by the male urban intellectual's
inability to detect the fictional status of the letters written on her behalf. Anna and Edith, both having
the tendency to fall into obliviousness, Anna's self-absorption is in physical pleasures of the body,
whilst Edith's self-absorption is in psychological pleasures of the imagination. As a result of both
types of activities, the characters find themselves in unfavourable positions by ways of neglecting
some relevant external elements of reality they find themselves in – the social circumstances of which
Anna is ignorant and the fact of living someone else's life, which is passed by Edith. Whilst it is
corporeality that makes Anna imperceptive, what drives Edith into this false "vicarious intimacy" is a
lack of the corporeal (Gilmartin & Mengham 2007: 99-100). Koehler goes even further in stating that
Edith "does not simply fall in love with Raye but in the process of reading and replying to his letters,"
which reflects back her own imaginative sentiments (Koehler, 2016: p. 192). This position opposes
Plotz's stance on the genuineness of Edith's love for Raye. In his interpretation of the story, though
Edith may feign her love at the beginning of their correspondence, the letters "create the very love
(inside her)," as she gets to read more of them. What is, according to Plotz, this genuine feeling
towards the man himself is supposedly manifested in the fragment when the couple kiss each other on
the mouth (Plotz 1996: 383). All considered, the story criticises the idea of love, let alone enduring
union between two people, being based on whimsical and ephemeral desires, or "imaginative
sentiments" (Koehler 2016: 195). The universal interpretation of the story's theme is in congruence
with the initial anonymity of the central characters.

In a more specific context, the short story also voices the powerful "critique of the obsolete
Victorian concepts of marriage and women" (Kempf 2010: 112). The tragic development of the story
originally traces back to the moment Edith is forced into an unhappy marriage to meet both societal
and her own family's expectations regarding gender and marriage. Lack of emotional rapport with her
husband and unfulfilled sensuality are ultimately what draw her to Raye, as she desperately and
voyeuristically seeks emotional intimacy with the handsome man. Edith also "ruins" Raye out of her
concern for the pregnant girl's good reputation, and in fear of Anna's condemnation and social
exclusion as a consequence of violating the repressive norms shared by the Victorian middle-class
society.

In one of the articles in Studies in Short Fiction, John Plotz offers an interesting analysis of the
story that draws on the symbolism and imagery of the roundabout and its circulating motion which
pervade "On the Western Circuit." In this interpretation, the grim and "inexorable stoker," who
operates the steam circus, deciding when the riders' turn should end, is presented as a maker of all the
incidents that happen in the story. Specifically, it follows the disastrous ramifications of "one ill-
chosen ride" for the protagonists who are not able to live up to an illusory love and the idealised
images of one another manufactured by the steam circus (Plotz 1996: 369). With the arrival of the
urban industrialism and technical advances, which are represented by the roundabouts, into the rural
Melchester, come urban problems. By creating an illusion more appealing to the viewer's eye than the
reality, the steam circuses delude characters into believing their feelings for one another are real and
genuine. The illusion or phantasm of the steam roundabout is not rooted in the present reality but is
indeed, "constitutive of a new (internal) reality" (Plotz 1996: 377). The thrill and pleasure provided by
the image of the world in a spinning motion, on the other hand, is for both the "idle spectator" and the
rider deposited in the form of each other (Plotz 1996: 379). The thrill of motion, mistaken by Anna
and Raye for the thrill of romance, has grown into this mistaken roundabout love and thrived on three
connected with the circus motion evils: Raye's money that enables Anna her next ride; Raye's job
which requires him to move with the judicial circuit, so that his infatuation with the girl does not fade;
and letters which directly trigger an epistolary romance. As Plotz aptly notices, the cash he pays for
Anna's ride is not produced to take pleasure of her presence but rather of her absence, as she whirls
away from him. Hence, money in "On the Western Circuit" used to prolong the whirling spectacle,
alienates the two, delaying their conversation (Plotz 1996: 380). Constant migrations his job requires
keep him in safe distance from any woman who would try to ensnare him, as he starts a new "piece of
romantic folly" in every next county. It is this mobility that he values most, as the image of him being
"chained to work for remainder of his life, with her (...) chained to his side" is what terrifies him
deeply. Finally, the letters of which any sample, interestingly enough, Hardy chooses not to
incorporate the letters in the story. The view shared by Plotz is that the absence of the letters in their
original form is evident of their irreproducibility and incommensurability, which also characterise the
roundabout experience (Plotz 1996: 383). Plotz's stance contrasts with the one taken by Koehler, who
posits that they are not disclosed to the reader "precisely because they are exceedingly reproducible,"
conforming to the prescriptive conventions on the portrayal of true love in the epistolary form, which
Edith so well has known from the Victorian novels or manuals (Koehler 2016: 194). Those three
elements are in fact roundabout or circulatory systems of modernism: the fiscal system operating at the
carnivals used to send and collect money; the judicial circuit which makes Raye move about Wessex;
and the postal system thanks to which the letters circulate among "the love triangle." All the
exploitations of the three sources of evil are the result of one visual misapprehension, the image of an
unrealistically appealing girl produced by the roundabout's manufactured optical phenomena. The
mistake that the lawyer makes, taking the desire ignited by the girl's good looks, a figment of the
imagination, for the love at first sight, follows a series of whirling illusions. As Plotz suggests, the
steam roundabout may be identified and qualified as an "object that almost seems dropped from a
future age," which appears in the work of the writers who confronted threats and novelties of
modernity that were to be incurred with scepticism (Plotz 1996: 371). The circus, as the element that
within the Wessex countryside surroundings stands out to the point of it existing "on quite another
level of reality," also symbolises the replacement of humans who by their conscious decisions wield
the power of their own lives by the automaticity of a mechanical process. Whirling motion of the
roundabout, as an invention brought by urban mechanisation, is paralleled with London's
contamination of England's traditional rural idyll (Plotz 1996: 372).

1. 6 Thomas Hardy's philosophical beliefs in the context of "On the Western Circuit"

"I have no philosophy," despite this assurance in his autobiography, Hardy's fiction shows deep
influences of some of the most prominent scholars whose groundbreaking philosophical ideas were
published in the writer's time (Hardy 1984: 441). Particularly inspiring for Hardy, as he himself
confesses in a letter to the American literary critic, were the matters of philosophical and scientific
interest broached by Huxley, Spencer, Comte, Hume, Mill and Schopenhauer (CL VI: 259).
Philosophical questions that were raised over the nineteenth century were largely concerned with the
motivations behind human actions. In his search for answer to this problem, Hardy studied some of the
contemporary journals in philosophy and works examining the relation of free will and determinism.
Evolutionary ideas which spread in the wake of the publication of Darwinian Origin of Species and
The Descent of Man are also evident in his literary creation. The world and humanity depicted in
Hardy's fiction, including "On the Western Circuit," is "governed by deterministic laws, such as those
of Immanent Will, Darwinian sexual selection, materialist laws of determinism, and the principle of
heredity" (Asquith 2013: 285). Hardy's characters, thrown into the harshness of this reality, strive to
confront it by means of their consciousness for understanding their position and the motives beyond
their actions that led them there, as well as by means of their exertion of free will in opposing the
forces dictating those actions. Not only evolutionary theories of sexual selection but also the idea of
the "will to life" introduced in the writings of the German philosopher had a great impact upon the
author, manifested in Hardy's darkened portrayal of love in many of his works. Sexual desire, as one
of the primal sensations experienced by the individual through their own body, next to longing, fearing
and aversion, entailed by the concept of Will, is Hardy's central object of study in "On the Western
Circuit." The characters in the short story as well as all the other phenomenal objects of perception in
the world are "merely the form in which the Will reveals itself in space and time" and are
objectifications of this blind and ceaseless urging (Mallett 2009: 30). Some of the entries in his
Literary Notebooks also reveal his interest in the social views of the French philosopher Charles
Fourier, examining the nature of human passions. Two of Fourier's claims left the deepest mark on his
literary works and happen to be in great detail explored in the short story under scrutiny: "that feeling
rather than reason governs human life and that the existing order of society failed to satisfy human
passions" (Mallett 2009: 21). Some of the issues addressed in the short story regarding the differences
between human life and machine are also indicative of Hardy's familiarity with the works of Haldane
(Ferguson 2017: 62).

The very first sentence of "On the Western Circuit" resonates with the Schopenhauer's idea that a
man's character is given or acquired rather than chosen. Just as Schopenhauer conceives of the
individual of "acquired character" "who has come fully to understand his actual character (...) and who
is thereby enabled to carry out in a methodical manner the 'role' which uniquely belongs to his own
person, without being (...) led astray by the impossible belief that he might by his own efforts become
something other than he is" as "an actor who has learnt the part assigned to him in a play and who
performs it 'artistically and methodically with firmness and grace,'" Hardy's character is "the man who
played the disturbing part in the two quiet feminine lives" (Gardiner 1963: 257-258). At this early
stage of the short story, the reader is already invited by the narrator into joining the great at the times
of Hardy debate over free will and determinism. Another prelude to the story's philosophical matter of
scrutiny is present in the image of humans propelled by mechanical horses of a roundabout running on
a steam engine, which symbolises the forces driving human actions as a whole. The steam circus
standing in the story for all the changes which were being continuously brought in by the
technological advances of modernism is ultimately presented as one of the evil sources of the
forthcoming misfortunes. This apparent hostility and mistrust of the author towards all sorts of
progress might be explained by Hardy's contact with Schopenhauer's ideas, as summarised by Sully in
Pessimism : "all progress as intellectual development necessarily increases the amount of suffering, so
that the world is tending to become worse instead of better" (Sully 1877: 97). In the short story, what
may be on the surface taken by the reader as a volatile act, and what is also seemingly for the character
an act of free will is constantly compromised by the inevitable forces constituting the Immanent Will.
Human agency responsible for the movement of the roundabout reflected in Raye's volitionary
payment is immediately challenged by the unrelenting time allotted in advance to each ride by the
automatic forces, as he is "dreading the moment when the inexorable stoker (...) should decide that this
set of riders had had their pennyworth." On the surface, the act of selection of the girl is, to Raye, the
choice corresponding with his own aesthetic criteria that is fully controlled by him. Trying to prove
this, his decision is preceded by conscious re-evaluation and careful comparison between the set of
options, as Anna proves to be third time lucky after abandoning his two other choices:

It was not that one with the light frock and light hat whom he had been at first attracted by; no, it was the
one with the black cape, grey skirt, light gloves and – no, not even she, but the one behind her; she with
the crimson skirt, dark jacket, brown hat and brown gloves. Unmistakably that was the prettiest girl.

In fact, however, his volitionary choice is preceded and overridden by the biological process of sexual
selection, as Raye subconsciously follows the procreative instinct. The satisfaction of Raye's desire is
again relied upon the will of the machine, as the observer waits for the full revolution of the circus to
catch another glance of the girl. Another stage of the relationship between Anna and Raye does not
rely anymore on natural process of desire but, upon Edith's intervention, it becomes solely dependent
upon the machinations of Edith (Ferguson 2017: 63-64). Lady Harnham is primarily shown as a
master of her own fate, not letting passions interfere with securing herself a marriage of convenience,
and later manipulating her desire by throwing into her the tone of "mechanical passiveness" while
reading Raye's sentimental responses. However, when Edith's artificial emotions get into and fuel this
mechanical "process of manufacture," they become genuine feelings of desire towards their addressee
and cannot be anymore restrained. Despite her initial willingness to shut out her passions, Edith's free
will in the end is subordinated to the deterministic force of desire. The characters' endeavours to exert
their will against the laws of determinism in "On the Western Circuit" appear to be doomed to failure
as most of their actions is motivated by the illusionary idea of romantic love. Hardy's representation of
love in the story seems to be in harmony with the Schopenhauer's stance on the matter the philosopher
takes in "On the Metaphysics of Sexual Love." For him, love is not a question of individual desire but
rather of the preservation of the entire human race (Schopenhauer 1958: 534). The characters' feelings
for one another grow on and are sustained by the deceptive workings of the reproductive drive, a
"voluptuous delusion" of true love, which is "exclusively directed to a particular individual," and
"which leads a man to believe that he will find greater pleasure in the arms of a woman whose beauty
appeals to him than in those of any other" (Schopenhauer 1958: 540). Anna, Edith and Charles,
convinced they act in the name of love, in reality satisfy their urge which is disguised under "the mask
of an objective admiration," subduing to the will of the whole species and serving its interest
(Schopenhauer 1958: 535). This procreative instinct by means of which the Will continues to realise
itself is manifested in Raye's conduct leading to Anna's pregnancy, and childless Edith's maternal
inclinations emerging when she wishes to be in Anna's position to carry Raye's child. The story ends
with a sense of fatalism evinced in a tragic for both parties incompatible union and unfulfilled love, as
the characters acknowledgingly relinquish the control over their own fate to the overwhelming
determinism.

Ruthless laws of biological determinism and evolution, universal forces of Immanent Will and
sexuality conspire together to bring human misery upon both the metropolitan and country dwellers of
a fictional world of Wessex. Though gloomy in its ending, the story ultimately leads the reader to
some incisive conclusions. Inspired by the ideas of Hartmann and Schopenhauer, Hardy in "On the
Western Circuit" seems to imply that the only possible escape from the overwhelming misery may be
found within a "common act of will annihilation," that is, "the submersion of the individual will within
the wider will, or the abandonment of consciousness to instinct" (Asquith 2013: 292-293). The
position of a spectator that is initially assumed by Raye not only foreshadows Hardy's portrayal of his
characters as mere observers of their actions, powerless against the determining motive forces behind
human behaviour, but also resonates with his own philosophy.

CHAPTER 2
2. Syntax, Dialect and FID (Free Indirect Discourse) in "On the Western Circuit"

2.1 Syntax and Style

Hardy's style of writing has met with many unfavourable criticisms both in author's own lifetime and
later. Hardy, as a writer whose collection of literary texts has been composed throughout distinct
periods of life, and is characterised by a rich diversity of genres, was often accused of inconsistency,
which would manifest itself in a lack of certain features to appear in constant way, and in even
distribution throughout his works. Critics generally also considered Hardy a careless writer who
employed in his works rare vocabulary, chaotic and confusingly complicated syntax, and who
breached decorum, "haphazardly mixing the learned and the colloquial, the simple and the complex"
(Chapman 1990: 36). Hardy's own view on style confirms the critical opinions he received regards his
writing, and that he valued more theme and approach in literature than the trivialities of style: "A
writer's style is according to his temperament, and my impression is that if he has anything to say
which is of value, and words to say it with, the style will come of itself" (CL I 168). Another
idiosyncratic phenomenon found by critics in Hardy's language regards the present in his prose
contrast between artifice of the mythically represented world and verisimilitude or directness reflected
for instance in fateful representation of the Dorset dialect. However, despite this superficial
carelessness or inconsistency attributed to Hardy by his critics, and confused with the writer's
deliberate "avoidance of the artificial and too 'literate' precision," the whole body of his work is a
carefully realised, in accordance with some essential aesthetic and philosophical principles, project
(Chapman 1990: 38). The pattern of particular strategies of representation is also present in the more
limited, with regard to the scope of linguistic behaviour displayed, genre than for instance novel, that
is, a short story.

G. L. Pane in her study on Hardy's prosaic language recognises six distinct techniques which,
obliquely conveying experiences and meaning, need to be transferred by the translator. Two modes of
passive voice, the reflexive mode, the counterfactual, the speculative form and the lexical terms
denoting an unknown being: "shape," "form" or "figure" are uniquely employed by Hardy to render
implicitly, through particular syntactic constructions and their semantic resonances, most significant
referential elements of represented experience.

Systematically applied in his novels passive structures denote the entry of a novel object or
character into the perceptual field, as the sensory act unfolds, bringing its observer, also new,
sensation. The syntax of the passive voice makes the perceptual act more prominent and through its
markedness and peculiarity as a locution provides a structural analogue for the significance of this
sensory act. A second feature conveyed by the passive construction through the effacement of any
subject is a shared nature of such perceptual experience as its object becomes a focus of attention for
several subjects – not only for the protagonists in the novel but also for the narrator and the reader.
Salient quality of the sensory activity and its shared character rendered by the syntax of the passive
voice are found also in "On the Western Circuit:" "The stoppage then came, and the sighs of the riders
were audible." As they enter into the auditory field, the voices of the riders, are elevated to
prominence because of their perceptual primacy over vision, reflecting not only the riders' shared
emotions, but also those of the main protagonists, as they are preceded by the description of one of the
characters who is "dreading the moment" when the steam circus will cease to swirl. Many of these
processes of interpreting what is presented to senses, occur in partial occlusion, caused as shown
below by a spatial field for example, which also demands such syntactic emphasis: "At length the
couple turned from the roundabout towards the door of Mrs. Harnham's house, and the young man
could be heard saying that he would accompany her home." Here, apart from the limitation created by
the withdrawal of the pair evident in this subjectless structure, both the narrator and the reader are
implied to participate in this generalised perceptual experience. Also, the passive voice raises to
prominence this moment, as later in the story, the pair will be seen through the window of the house
by its owner, Mrs Harnham. In the following two fragments the word order in the passive sentence
additionally carries a semantic load, iconically representing the temporal order; in the first case, the
linearity of the sound as it is echoed through the walls of the Cathedral; and in the second one,
involving this time the visual experience, when the elements of Raye's gown and wig enter the visual
field before the character himself is seeable, as he passes the street in hurry.

While he stood the presence of the Cathedral walls was revealed rather by the ear than by the eyes; he could
not see them, but they reflected sharply a roar of sound which entered the Close by a street leading from the
city square, and, falling upon the building, was flung back upon him.

In the natural order of things Raye would have arrived at the latter place on Monday afternoon; but it was not
till the middle of Wednesday that his gown and grey wig, curled in tiers, in the best fashion of Assyrian bas-
reliefs, were seen blowing and bobbing behind him as he hastily walked up the High Street from his
lodgings.

Next strategy, the second mode of the passive voice regularly employed by Hardy in his prose also
depicts perceptual encounters, with the only difference being that they are instantaneous – all the
phases of interpretive process from the previous mode are now compressed into one moment of
revelation. In the second mode of the passive construction devoid of any verb of perception not only is
the perceiving subject omitted but the perceiving act itself, creating an impression of a sudden
discovery. In "While he stood the presence of the Cathedral walls was revealed rather by the ear than
by the eyes" the Cathedral is suddenly disclosed to Raye, before he is even aware. The perceptual act
as if occurs without the subject's control over the entering into his field of perception object, which by
itself finds his attention, so that Raye loses his agency and assumes the role of a passive recipient.
More importantly however, in the context of the disclosure of this religious place of worship of a
deity, "revelation, semantically, conveys the divine, an emergence from some other realm" (Pane
2017: 58). Indeed, the Cathedral, as a revealing force, brings the presence of the sacred realm to the
observer, turning the act of perception into the privilege conferred upon Raye.

The third technique, the reflexive mode, also represents an instantaneous perceptual revelation but
this time the novel object of perception, fulfilling the role of an acting subject, is its source. The
reflexive structure, assigning the grammatical function of subject to one particular linguistic item,
confers upon it perceptual prominence and novelty. This agency enhances the object's autonomy. The
object as an agent, being able to act of its own accord, gains motion through the acquired reflexive
structure and is animated. Through the animacy, the compositional field is structured according to the
dynamics of perception, and the animated object, obtaining the status of figure is set against the static
ground. Animacy is also applied to render the distant and indistinct quality in objects that are difficult
to discern. The importance of Anna's reactions preceding her crucial for the story's narrative arc
revelation about her pregnancy is syntactically reflected by means of promoting her emotional state to
the linguistic subject-position and thus, giving its animacy: "There was a strange anxiety in her
manner which did not escape Mrs. Harnham, and ultimately resolved itself into a flood of tears."
Anna's feelings are intensified in this description through the reflexive mode, as their progression
unfolds autonomously, not only beyond Mrs Harnham's control but also beyond Anna's will, acting
upon her as a passive, experiencing human subject. The reflexive structure also has lexical correlates
"in particular phrases that explicitly declare the object world to act on the perceiving subject" such as
"meet one's eyes" or "come to one's ears" (Pane 2017: 61). In the short story the reflexive is also
lexically realised, leaving the impression of the object acting with even greater force: "the long plate-
glass mirrors set at angles, which revolved with the machine, flashed the gyrating personages and
hobby-horses kaleidoscopically into his eyes." Both the reflexive mode and its explicit lexical
counterparts represent an object whose force is alive due to the mastery of natural phenomena
(psychological and physiological processes occurring within human body as well as physical processes
such as reflection) within the magisterial world.

Next strategy employed by Hardy in his fiction consists in the use of particular lexical items such
as "figure," "form," "shape." These instances of vocabulary are primarily employed to denote an
unknown object which is then, further in the narrative, to be gradually disclosed. The revealing
process of these figures starts the moment an unknown being is detected and ends in its recognition.
Like in the case of the first mode of the passive voice, the technique transfers a sensory, most often
visual, experience that occupies a wider interval within the narrative due to some external barriers
such as spatial field, the only difference being that what is emphasised here is not the perceptual
activity but its object, like for example in the following fragment:

Then the pleasure-machine started again, and, to the light-hearted girl, the figure of the handsome young
man, the market-square with its lights and crowd, the houses beyond, and the world at large, began moving
round as before, countermoving in the revolving mirrors on her right hand, she being as it were the fixed
point in an undulating, dazzling, lurid universe, in which loomed forward most prominently of all the form of
her late interlocutor.

Not only is the girl's perception of the man occluded by the distance but also by the swirling motion of
the roundabout, rendering her vision indistinct, so that the quality of the blurry contours and
countenance of Raye, as seen by Anna in that very moment, is reproduced within the narrative as "the
figure" and "the form". Hardy also uses these unnamed, begging the question figures with a view to
producing tension while holding his readers in suspension and uncertainty, as is illustrated below:

In the course of half an hour a figure opened the door of the apartment.

‘Ah—who’s that?’ she said, starting up, for it was dark.

‘Your husband—who should it be?’ said the worthy merchant.
‘Ah—my husband!—I forgot I had a husband!’ she whispered to herself.

Here, the narrator remains intentionally vague and evasive, as if playing with the reader, who may
delude themselves as to the true identity of "a figure," deeming it to be Edith's beloved instead of her
husband, in the hope of a happy ending. What is more, the discrete lexical unit expresses here Edith's
inner state and feelings as she has troubles recognising her own husband, who, compared to the one
whose image possessed her soul, has become so insignificant in her life that his existence has been
forgotten. Furthermore, these anonymous figures stand exclusively for the perceived beings' exterior
appearance, not their inner character, implying that the perceiving subject has no emotions towards her
husband as a personality – he is just a physical object. By the usage of these unique items of
vocabulary is also illustrated the fact that the characters in the story view themselves as aesthetically
pleasing objects of desire, or beings that are not real but rather ideal products of imagination. Verbs
which denote the activity of forms or figures are "appear" or "vanish" and are in congruence with the
principles of solipsism – there exist only what may be perceived. Thus, Anna and Raye are represented
not as objects of perception in the field of vision to each other but as objects of desire in the field of
their minds:
 he waited for her every reappearance, glancing indifferently over the intervening scenes (...) till his select
country beauty followed on again in her place. He had never seen a fairer product of nature, and at each
round she made a deeper mark in his sentiments.

Anna looked attractive in the somewhat fashionable clothes which Mrs. Harnham had helped her to buy,
though not quite so attractive as, an innocent child, she had appeared in her country gown on the back of the
wooden horse at Melchester Fair.

A "figure" as a whole designates the subjectivised image of another person with a complete disregard
for this being's unique identity, reducing their status to a mere object. This strategy referring
interchangeably to an object of romantic fantasy and an object which cannot be clearly perceived or
otherwise comprehended "reveals a strong link between desiring and not fully perceiving another
individual, between a love object and a perceptual object without interior being" (Pane 2017: 64). Both
situations qualify as instances of solipsism, the existence of a perceived object being utterly reliant
upon the subjective visual account of the observer. This "romantic solipsism" is evident in Hardy's
portrayal of human relationships, of which ephemeral nature stems from the subjective character of
love which is transferred on the more attractive thing nearly within each change in the visual scene of
the perceiving subject.

Through his fifth technique, the counterfactual, Hardy reveals to the reader a parallel possible
reality, of which characters are not aware. This linguistic structure is particularly made use of not only
in "On the Western Circuit" but in the whole volume of Life's Little Ironies, as the stories in this
collection all entail dramatic for their protagonists course of events by way of ironic fatalism, as the
blind characters' ignorant actions, rooted in the limits of human knowledge are juxtaposed against
unchosen paths, ramifications of unselected courses of action and lost opportunities. Moreover, the
counterfactual has additional cognitive value, providing the grounding conditions of the story's
fictional world, in that it presupposes the existence of the fictional events presented in the story, as
they become factual in relation to the obliquely stated, counterfactual events within this same world of
fiction. The omniscient narrator in the following fragment assures the reader that Raye will never find
marital happiness with illiterate Anna, even if she were able to write in another, conceived by the
narrator and disclosed to the reader only, plane of existence, as the girl will always be inferior in her
sophistication and brightness to the mistress, Lady Harnham:

They were her own impassioned and pent-up ideas – lowered to monosyllabic phraseology in order to keep
up the disguise – that Edith put into letters signed with another name, much to the shallow Anna's delight,
who, unassisted, could not for the world have conceived such pretty fancies for winning him, even had she
been able to write them.

In the subsequent segment the reader learns about Raye's irresponsible character, his inner inability to
face the consequences of his own actions, even those far-reaching and of major significance, by means
of the counterfactual narrative:

Raye wrote, in his real name, what he would never have decided to write on his own responsibility; namely
that he could not live without her, and would come down in the spring and shelve her looming difficulty by
marrying her.

Occasionally, the counterfactual serves as the possibility for disclosure of a significant event or
information, as in the passage below, where Raye's identity is revealed by means of a counterfactual
question:
 As he stood smiling there in the motley crowd, with his pipe in his hand, and clad in the rough pea-jacket and
wideawake that he had put on for his stroll, who would have supposed him to be Charles Bradford Raye,
Esquire, stuff-gownsman, educated at Wintoncester, called to the Bar at Lincoln's Inn, now going the
Western Circuit, merely detained in Melchester by a small arbitration after his brethren had moved on to the
next county-town?

Such phrases or copulative verbs as: "seem," "as if" and "whether... or not" constitute the
speculative form – another technique employed by Hardy in his fiction to mark the qualified
representation of characters' state of mind. Through the use of these forms of speculation within the
narrative, the protagonists are represented from the outer perspective, so that their inner state can be
only implied and guessed: "The conversation was indeed theirs only, Anna being as a domestic animal
who humbly heard but understood not. Raye seemed startled in awakening to this fact, and began to
feel dissatisfied with her inadequacy." However, within a short interval, as shown above, Hardy
switches this perspective, shifting the mode of narrative from uncertain suggestion to definitive
account of the characters' inner state ("began to feel dissatisfied with her inadequacy"). Such
oscillation between two distinct levels of intimacy, realised through speculation, "creates mystery,
possibility, uncertainty, and thus heightened affect," rendering the magnitude appropriate to this
moment in the story's unfoldment – the moment of anagnorisis, starting the initial phase of Raye's
recognition of the true state of affairs. Speculation provides affective prominence which could not be
elicit by the objective events of the represented world. Within this inclination to create uncertainty
through the qualified psychic intimacy, the narrator does not aim to be ominously careless, but
speculation is rather indicative of their delicacy not to misrepresent the characters, mistakenly
presuming something which is not the case. Zero focalisation is subordinated to speculation also in the
following fragment of the story, where the narrator decides to withhold the judgment regarding the
reprehensible behaviour of Edith's husband, after Anna is compelled to leave the couple's house,
qualifying the disclosure of his knowledge: "Whether an inkling of Anna’s circumstances reached the
knowledge of Mrs. Harnham’s husband or not cannot be said, but the girl was compelled, in spite of
Edith’s entreaties, to leave the house." Apart from being markers of the curtailed proximity to
characters' inner experience, speculative forms also serve another function, as indicators of a spatial
field. Such a qualified representation of an external event points to its public nature. The events
happening at the Melchester Fair, taking place in a social setting, are described by means of
speculative forms: "Their motions were so rhythmical that they seemed to be moved by machinery.
And it presently appeared that they were moved by machinery indeed." At times speculation allows
Hardy to obliquely question veracity of a particular, superficially true statement, foreshadowing what
soon will be proven false and thus, warning the reader to remain distrustful towards these opinions.
This is shown in a subsequent passage, where Raye's devotion as a lover is doubted by the narrator,
who heralds Raye's true intentions to use the naive country girl: "At length the couple turned from the
roundabout towards the door of Mrs. Harnham's house, and the young man could be heard saying that
he would accompany her home. Anna, then, had found a lover, apparently a very devoted one." Later
on in the story, the speculative form "apparently," which undermines truthfulness of statements, also
renders Raye's hamatria, limitations of his knowledge as regards Anna's writing skills: "He had really
a tender regard for the country girl, and it grew more tender than ever when he found her apparently
capable of expressing the deepest sensibilities in the simplest words."

Whilst the two modes of the passive voice, the reflexive mode and the use of the figure-type
vocabulary to denote an unknown entity, all transfer the entry of a novel object into the field of
perception, the latter strategies: the counterfactual and the speculative, fulfill two distinct roles, to
manipulate the narrative perspective to adjust it either to different levels of psychic proximity to the
character's inner experience or to different levels of physical proximity to the exterior situations, and
to constitute the fictional world's grounding premise, respectively. Such referential features of the
represented world as "thematic significance, perceptual salience, novelty, spatial distance, wonder" are
conveyed implicitly by means of distinct language's syntactic forms and their lexical equivalents,
rather than by means of its direct referential capacity (Pane 2017: 73). Diminishing the subject's role
implies a shared nature of a perceptual activity, while advancing referents to its position, introduces
the figure-ground division, conferring upon them prominence. Animating an object of perception by
means of the reflexive mode, gives it the primacy. Through the speculative, a private event is
presented as if happening in a distance, implying its limited visibility from the observer's perspective.
Those strategies ought to be kept in mind by the translator while rendering the aspects of Hardy's
prose into the target language, given the semantic load they carry for the fateful representation of the
characters and their experience.

2.2 Dialect

2.2.1 Deixis in Dialect

Any dialect of any particular language owes its existence solely to the contrast between itself and a
higher level linguistic system, and which, for that reason, cannot occur as independent network of
linguistic items. A standard language becomes a necessary prerequisite and a referent point for
nonstandard speech. Such a relation in which the meaning of one is contingent upon the other is
reminiscent of that between lexical deictic markers: now, here, I, etc., and the moment and place of an
utterance. If one replaces the reference system of time and place with the standard language and
particular deictic units with any forms of dialectal speech, the relation of deixis remains unaltered.
However, rather than anchoring the nonstandard variety of language along the temporal and spatial
dimension, the relation of deixis is established in social space (Berezowski 1997: 37).

2.2.2 Dialect in "On the Western Circuit"

Hardy as a keen enthusiast and admirer of rural life, interested in Dorset folklore, customs and rustic
speech, reproduces much of this social knowledge of his birthplace, particularly the dialect, in his
literature. The dialect spoken by the rural dwellers of Wessex was essentially Dorset with some few
traits from the nearest counties. Hardy primarily implemented the features of rustic speech for
pragmatic reasons, to mark the status of his protagonists on the social hierarchy. Convinced that with
the spread of the national education, English will become homogenous and uniform, Hardy in "On the
Western Circuit," through the use of dialect, makes the discrepancy between the two characters'
worlds clear, heralding what one of the story's character could not see behind the mask of epistolary
artifice – incompatibility that exists between the life of a cosmopolitan and that of a villager.

The speech of the rural Dorset dwellers differs considerably in terms of pronunciation, lexis and
grammar from the standard English. One of the most frequent phonological tendencies present in the
Dorset dialect is the loss of initial or final consonantal sounds in a cluster of consonants, as in o' for
"of" and 'ithout for "without." Equally common characteristic of the Dorset colloquial use of language
is the loss of one or more consonants or unstressed vowels from the interior of a word, called syncope,
as in b'lieve ("believe"), wo's ("worse") or m'm ("madame"). Another feature of the Dorset speech
consists in the voicing of particular initial consonants: th in English becomes d, f becomes v and s is
pronounced as z, as in drow for "throw," vall for "fall" and zee for "see." The Dorset speakers also
pronounce some vowel sounds differently, changing [i] into [e] in "bead," "meat" and "read" for bed,
met and red; the long monophthong [i:] into the diphthong [ei] in a hape or a dale o' whate ("a heap or
a deal of wheat"); and [ɔ:] into [a] in words such as for instance carn ("corn"), harn ("horn") and starm
("storm"). Other regularities observed to occur in the dialect are weakened forms: 'tis of "it is," 'twas
of "it was," nater of "nature" and winder of "window," which stem from the carelessness of the Dorset
speaker that is characteristic of colloquialisms rather than from local idiosyncrasies of such forms.
There are also other peculiarities on the lexical plane apparent in the Dorset speech but which do not
fall within the scope of this paper as they are not exploited in the text. The features of the Dorset
dialect that are conveyed by Hardy in "On the Western Circuit" through grammar entail the structure
of or o' for the possessive case instead of the case ending "-s" that would be otherwise standardly used
to mark a relation of ownership with a person, rather than a thing, as for instance in such expressions
as: I can't for the life o' me make up out of my own head or look at the veet o'n ("look at his feet")
(Barnes 1886: 16). Another trait of the Dorset speech related to syntax and manifested by Hardy in
Anna's linguistic behaviour consists in the application of the auxiliary "do" as "a helping word to time-
words of the present time," as in: I do hope or he do read (Barnes 1886: 39).

Not only local tendencies of the Dorset dialect spoken by Anna are indicative of the peasant girl's
rudimentary knowledge, rural background and overall unsophistication but also her own idiolect.
Anna's use of language differs from other characters in terms of grammar and consists in violating the
rule of inversion that applies in the formulation of interrogative sentences. Her inadequate knowledge
of English is also shown in grammatical mistakes such as using the adjective "bad" instead of the
adverb "badly" to modify a verb: I should do it so bad. Another Dorset peculiarity regards the general
tendency of usage of the modal "shall" instead of "will" in future tenses for any grammatical person
and also in the tenses of potential mood the usage of "should" instead of "would:" I shall do it well at
last or I should do it so bad. He'd be ashamed of me, and never see me again! (Barnes 1886: 22).

Dialect as well as idiolect features are not only assigned to protagonists according to their
socioeconomic rank and educational level but also depending on their psychological state, as the
characters are more likely to reverse to dialect on the spur of the moment, when under the pressure of
emotion, and forgetting all about the artificially imposed and taught linguistic norms.

2.2.3 Berezowski's Procedures of Dialect Translation

Berezowski in his work on rendering the dialect in the TL distinguishes fourteen procedures
implemented by translators when dealing with the SL variety: neutralisation, rural lexicalisation,
colloquial lexicalisation, diminutive lexicalisation, artificial lexicalisation, partial translation,
transliteration, speech defect, honorifics relativisation, terms of address relativisation, pidginisation,
artificial variety, colloquialisation and rusticalisation. Additionally, to account for the varying
tendencies shown by each translation procedure with regard to the distinct linguistic levels that are
exploited in the nonstandard speech transfer, Berezowski divides dialect markers into four groups:

a) phonology/phonetics – features of a TL nonstandard variety rendering through TT spelling its

characteristic pronunciation;

b) morphology – TL dialect markers transferring inflectional paradigmatic variation present in a given

nonstandard speech of the language users, including honorifics;

c) lexis – dialectal vocabulary, including terms of address;

d) syntax – any dialectal features apparent above the lexical plane, that is, regarding the position of
words and their functions with relation to one another

The procedures propounded by Berezowski in 1997 can be put on a continuum with reference to the
two criteria: the semantic and formal value of the text, and its integrity; reflecting translators' choices
to either remain faithful to the SL text's meaning inherent in the social deixis that are relevant with
regard to the reading of the whole work, preserving the original's style as well as its formal properties
but at the same time jeopardising its integrity through the introduction of the foreign and thus false
intertextuality to the TT readership, and activation of culturally based connotations not present in the
SL that eventually distort the SL text's overall meaning; or neglecting its style in their strife to transfer
the original's core message in accordance with the principles of dynamic equivalence and preserving
the SL text's integrity.

1 Neutralisation

When the dialect markers present in the ST are not reflected in the translation on neither of linguistic
strata, the original went through the process of neutralisation. There are two different drives behind the
translators' resorting to this strategy: homogenising the characters' speech remains negligible for the
integrity of the text, and the false intertextuality brought about by the cultural associations that come
together with the reality of the TL dialect speaking community skew the meaning of the original. The
former rationale finds its usage in texts devoid of any social contrast brought out by the characters
belonging to different social strata, where there is no heteroglossia "either due to the monologue
nature of the text, e.g. poetry in the vernacular or because the same dialect is used by all the
nonstandard speaking characters" (Berezowski 1997: 51). The translator employing this strategy
performs the process of translating on two levels: intralingually, rendering SL variety into its standard
form, and interlingually, transferring the SL standard speech into the TL text.

The difference in social deixis marked by the author in the short story resonates with the hierarchy
placing each of the characters of "On the Western Circuit" in a different social group corresponding to
their age, financial, educational and geographical status, which in turn, is inseparable from the whole
meaning of the fictional world, in which any plan or attempt made at trespassing within the boundaries
of own social stratum, however cunning it may be, is met with failure and is reminiscent of what is
known in terms of dramatic literature as hamatria. Therefore, the implementation of the neutralisation
procedure in translating "On the Western Circuit" would be considered highly ineffective.

2 Lexicalisation

A very popular technique, lexicalisation, seems to be a preferable compromise among the translators,
who, torn between the prospect of either distorting the meaning of the original or foregoing it, resort to
the procedure that consists again in intralingual and interlingual transference, except that the former
process does not occur on the lexical plane of language use. With a view to more incisive scrutiny of
the translation procedures and its application in practice, Berezowski futher on divides the strategy
into the four subcategories drawing on the distinct dimensions of a particular group of an unmarked
form of language users in which a given dialect operates, such as for instance, geographical, social or
temporal.

a) rural lexicalisation

The TL text abounds in vocabulary that is rendered along the regional dimension and is indicative of a
social group of which members live in the country. As the studies conducted by Berezowski, though
on limited corpora, have shown, this subprocedure finds its application only in SL texts carrying traits
of a regional dialect.

b) colloquial lexicalisation

The social aspect of SL social deixis is transferred onto the lexical items characteristic of the TL
nonstandard variety language users who stand out from the characters belonging to other strata of
society in terms of the register. The protagonists speaking colloquialisms dismiss the level of formality
a given situation in which they found themselves requires, and are associated with the lowest social
class, that is the poor, the uneducated, the underprivilidged, etc. The procedure has been found to be
implemented not only to make up for the locus of the original text's social deixis, the colloquial
speech, but as it was established by Berezowski, in even more cases to render the SL regional
varieties.

c) diminutive lexicalisation

When social deictic markers are rendered in the temporal aspect of the characters' lives, pointing to the
TT readership their age, the original text underwent the process of diminutive lexicalisation.
Diminutive forms imply that members of the SL society speaking its nonstandard form belong in the
target culture to either the youngest strata of the target language users or to the elderly. The condition
that is sufficient for the selection of this substrategy seems to be determined by the age of the potential
target readership, as this is the most identifiable variety of dialect for the nonadult reader.

d) artificial lexicalisation

This procedure involves the translator conceiving new vocabulary which is characteristic of a fictitious
society, transgressing the temporal or spatial dimension of this world for the sake of rendering the
same sense of foreign quality evoked in the source recipients.

3 Partial translation

Similar to lexicalisation, constituting a sole locus of social deixis, partial translation, differs from the
former in that it introduces the third language into the translated text. The untransliterated foreign
phrase is rendered neither on the intra- nor interlingual level. The introduction of the third party
implicates the foreign origin of the protagonist and "the fact that the TL is the second language for
them" (Berezowski 1997: 60).

4 Transliteration

Transliteration technique is a direct intralingual transfer of a nonstandard language unit from the ST
consisting in four adapting processes: the graphological form of an SL item is transcribed in SL and
then adjusted respectively to phonological and graphological standards of the TL as dialectal varieties.

5 Speech defect

The procedure again, as lexicalisation, may be considered golden means in translation, retaining the
meaning inherent in the social contrast and not introducing false intertextual implications, given the
fact that the imperfect way of speaking does not relate these dialectal differences to any specific TL
variety. In order for this procedure to be deemed successful, the implemented speech defect should not
occur randomly or sporadically for it not to be mistaken by the reader as a character's idiosyncratic
behaviour or a sign of their mental inability.

6 Relativisation

Relativisation means reducing the SL dialectal features to forms of address (the lexical TL dialect
markers) or honorifics (the morphological TL dialect markers) with a view to preserving power
relations between the protagonists.

7 Pidginisation
Unlike the previously discussed techniques, pidginisation comprises all the language strata:
phonological, lexical, morphological and syntactical, being a full TL linguistic variation. The
nonstandard speech rendered interlingually directly from one SL dialect as the other TL dialect is
characterised by the contamination of one superior standard TL form by the ill-formed, incorrect
application of linguistic rules, or by another language, popular among this particular variety-speaking
community.

8 Artificial variety

This method is an extension of the already mentioned artificial lexicalisation, and is applied when the
translator in order to make up for the SL variation creates a whole new language, this time not
restricted only to the level of lexis but operating as a full TL nonstandard variety.

9 Colloquialisation

Colloquialisation is, like the previous methods, a fully operational form of nonstandardisation but its
prominence owes to the fact that it is "more central to the structure of language than a virtually unused
pidgin or hypothetical dialect of the future" (Berezowski 1997: 78). Social deictic information inherent
in the variation brings on to the TL readership the implications of the lack of education and privileges,
poverty, powerlessness, vulnerability while identifying the speaker. The translator resorting to
colloquialisms does not locate the given nonstandard form-speaking social group, insinuating wrong
associations, as the colloquial dialect functions throughout the whole TL territory.

10 Rusticalisation

The target text, after being rusticalised, again, constitutes a full version of a nonstandard language
spoken in the country. The rusticalisation may involve transferring the speech of one specific variety,
which on one hand enables the full retrieval of sociological, geographical, historical and cultural
relationships between the nonstandard language-speaking community and the rest of the society, but
on the other, presupposing social deictic meanings available only to the target reader, brings about "a
cultural discrepancy or incoherence" (Szymańska 2017: 64). However, the procedure may as well
consists in resorting not to only one specific TL variety but choosing either more of them, or selecting
such dialectal features that are common to all major regional varieties of TL.

As is noted by Szymańska, sociolect (social dialect) proves to be less challenging than regionalect
(geographical dialect), as the former "can often be rendered in a functionally adequate way," whereas
the latter often imposes on the translator a dilemma of whether to neutralise it as a standard variety
that does not recreate its functions in the SL society, or to replace it with a TL regionalect, which
"falsifies the cultural reality" (Szymańska 2017: 64).

2.2.4 Pinto's Strategies of Linguistic Variation Translation

Pinto's strategies are firstly divided on the basis of the presence of the contrast between a higher level
linguistic system and its nonstandard variety; wherever such is not present, a dialect is not preserved,
regardless if the TT is written in a language variation (dialectisation) or if it is written in the standard
form (normalisation). Wherever such contrast is transferred, a translation preserves the dialect. Further
on, the translator is faced with the dilemma regarding the transference of spatial and time coordinates,
that is, whether to preserve the location in which the action takes place, and the year it happens, or not,
in case of the latter, for instance, by rendering the characters' archaic speech into the present-day
discourse. When either of the coordinates is changed in the translation, Pinto declares it to be an
adaptation, which is divided into further substrategies, but, as a nontranslation, will not be an object of
 interest in this paper. Translations proper that preserve both of the coordinates are further on
distinguished between those which apply familiar to the TL readership dialectal features, and those
which exploit unknown to the TC features.

PRESERVATION OF DIALECT NON-PRESERVATION OF DIALECT

NON-
PRESERVATION
PRESERVATION OF THE ONLY STANDARD
OF SPATIAL ONLY NON-STANDARD
SPACE AND TIME VARIETY/NORMALISATIO
AND/OR TIME VARIETY/DIALECTISATIO
COORDINATES OF THE N (NEUTRALISATION in
COORDINATES N
ST (TRANSLATIONS) Berezowski)
(ADAPTATIONS
)
A) USE OF
B) USE OF
FAMILIAR
NON-
FEATURES
FAMILIAR
RECOGNISE
FEATURE
D AS NON-
S IN THE
STANDARD
TC
IN THE TC

A) familiar features:

 explicit verbal markers indicating that the character was speaking in a dialect, occurring
immediately after a nonstandard linguistic variety is used in the ST
 reduction of the linguistic variation to forms of address and honorifics (relativisation in
Berezowski)
 upgrading of the level of formality of the standard speech (the opposite of colloquialisation in
Berezowski)
 use of oral discourse features (colloquialisation in Berezowski)
 use of features from different dialects
 use of features from one specific dialect

B) non-familiar features:

 direct import of certain lexical features from the ST (partial translation in Berezowski)
 introduction of certain lexical features from the ST after their adjustment to the spelling norms
of the TL (transliteration in Berezowski)
 virtual dialect (artificial variety in Berezowski)

(Pinto 2009: 293)

Many of the strategies offered by Berezowski coincide with the ones provided by Pinto: neutralisation,
or normalisation, relativisation, colloquialisation, partial translation, transliteration and artificial
variety.

The Berezowski's procedures that are not overtly labelled in Pinto's proposal include: diminutive
lexicalisation, rusticalisation, speech defect and pidginisation. However, rusticalisation qualifies as a
subcategory of either of the two Pinto's strategies: the use of features from a particular dialect or the
use of features of two or more distinct dialects. As for the diminutive lexicalisation and speech defect,
the two procedures can hardly qualify as dialects, being idiosyncratic, and characteristic of the speech
of only one protagonist. The procedures are rather a matter of each translator's stylisation of the ST
and their creativity in transferring the SL dialectal features so that they do not only "stand out" from
the standard form of language system, yet ideally also, transfer in the TT the same or similar kind of
message to the potential TT reader, as that received by the ST readership. Different case is with
pidginisation, where some linguistic patterns eventuate from breaking the same grammatical rules or
contamination with the same first language used by a group of its users living in a country, where
different language is spoken, functioning as a second for those foreigners. Where such colonies are
numerous in its members, and emerging from one generation to other, living and communicating
together as a separate social group, users of pidgin language imitate one another, and a more
homogenous linguistic variation is derived.

What is absent in the Berezowski's proposal is quite an interesting solution of introducing explicit
indication to the reader informing them of the use of a linguistic variety by a particular protagonist.
The strategy may be deemed problematic in terms of breaking the fluency of reading, if the given
character plays a major role and resorts to dialect only in some situations, which would demand many
of such warnings provided by the translator, but additionally also signs that a particular protagonist
finished speaking in a dialect and started using a standard form of language. Another technique
unmentioned by Berezowski concerns the change of register to a more formal. This procedure could
be useful when the SL dialect in the original was employed by the author to relay such information as
for instance, the character's higher social standing and education, aristocratic origins and gentility.

2.3. Free indirect discourse (FID)

Free indirect style is a method of rendering the words or thoughts of the character into the reported
form but also directly transferring some of the character's syntactic forms and idiolect as a part of
direct speech. Employed by Hardy free indirect style provides an important for the story's unfolding
insight into the minds and habitual modes of thought of the characters.

2.3.1 The syntactic account of FID

This narrative style displays features of both direct and indirect discourse. FID shares with the direct
speech the representation of exclamatives, interrogatives, expressive elements, sentential adverbs and
dialectal language of a thinker/speaker as well as a lack of non-obligatory embedding, root
transformations, expressive elements and constructions, incomplete sentences, subjectless imperatives,
direct address, dialectal differences or a foreign language and addressee-oriented adverbials (Banfield
2014: 28-34). What sets them apart is a shift in tense and pronouns (Banfield 2014: 100). Syntactic
comparative account of direct and indirect speech proposed by Banfield implies, however, that FID is
a variety of direct discourse. Free indirect thought or speech and direct one share the same structure
that consists of two E-nodes that stand for two expressions, which, though allowing for embedding,
are independent and non-recursive. FID is "free" of a mandatory subordinate clause introducing the
direct thought. Indirect discourse, apart from E-node, that is, quotational phrase: "said/thought that,"
comprises an embedded S-node corresponding to the reported thought or speech.

2.3.2 The semantic account of FID

The simultaneous presence and the mixture of two voices in FID corresponds to the discreteness
between the reporter's perspective entailing the utterance situation and the thinker's perspective, their
own point of reference. This idea of dual voice is developed by Schlenker in his context and
indexicality twofold division as a prerequisite for FID examination. The Context of Thought (CT)
embracing origin of a thought, a thinker and a time of thought, contrasts with the Context of Utterance
(CU) involving an expression, an utterer/narrator and a time of utterance. Indexicals fall into two
categories: CU sensitive pronouns and tenses, which are referentially restricted by certain grammatical
categories such as gender, person and tense, and CT sensitive referential indexicals and
demonstratives, that is, all indexicals excluding pronouns and tenses, of which meaning is lexically
specified by the thinker and utterly dependent on their intention.

2.3.3 Translation of FID

Such blending of the two points of view – of the reporter and the reported – manifests itself in the
incoherent linguistic form of FID, as this mode of discourse presentation accommodates features of
linguistic behaviour that are assigned both to the narrator and the character. This inner quality of FID,
its implicitness in discourse attribution, invites the reader to make an interpretative choice as to
whether the text constitutes mere narration or merges the two perspectives. Within the narrative of
"On the Western Circuit" Hardy employs legal language to represent the point of view of one of the
characters who is a lawyer. Legal phrases function as "indications of alterity (...) evoking the
impression of a subjective consciousness" and which might be omitted in translation, leading to the
weakening or loss of FID (Kuusi 2016: 16). Translational shifts in the mode of discourse presentation
interfering in the reader's interpretation may be either conscious or unintentional, as they may be
motivated by translators' pragmatic considerations regarding the text's readability, supplying the reader
with a 'more coherent' interpretation or by their inclinations to naturalise the peculiarities of the
unconventional FID. Together with such standardisation comes the unity of voice and the loss of
merging in FID perspectives, as well as this mode's functions, such as retaining "the immediacy and
vivacity of DD" implying the unconscious and unverbalised nature of characters' thoughts and
experiences, and controlling the readers' sympathies (Kuusi 2016: 18-19). To conclude, the translator's
task should be to preserve the subjective peculiarities of linguistic behaviour present within the
narrative preserving FID, providing the reader with the direct access to the mind of the character
instead of distancing the reader from the protagonist.

CHAPTER 3

3. Translation of Selected Fragments with a Commentary

3.1 Syntax and style

What is often true of literary translation is that more important task than to render what the text says
(semantics) is to replicate how it is said (style). Among a range of such markers of style, the most
apparent and distinctive one is a predilection for particular sentence structures and their lexical
analogues. Expected to transfer a style associated with an author of a chosen source text, the translator
must first know what the stylistic features are before they are about to replicate them.

3.1.1 The first mode of the passive voice

The stoppage then came, and the sighs of the riders were audible (Hardy 1998: 77).

Potem nastąpiło zatrzymanie i słychać było westchnienia jeźdźców.

Through the process of "modulation," the passive mode identifiable in the ST as indicative of the
narrator's obstructed perspective (were audible) is rendered into Polish as active słychać było instead
of its less popular and natural passive equivalent słyszalne były [westchnienia jeźdźców] (Newmark
1988: 88).

At length the couple turned from the roundabout towards the door of Mrs. Harnham's house, and the
young man could be heard saying that he would accompany her home (Hardy 1998: 80).

W końcu para odeszła od karuzeli i skierowała się w stronę drzwi domu pani Harnham, i dało się
słyszeć, jak młodzieniec mówi, że odprowadzi ją do domu.

The passive structure characteristic of the SL hasn't got its equivalent in Polish, thus the "modulation"
in translation is obligatory (Newmark 1988: 88). For the purposes of modality retention, could be
heard is translated into dało się słyszeć rather than into its less marked equivalent słychać było.

While he stood the presence of the Cathedral walls was revealed rather by the ear than by the eyes; he
could not see them, but they reflected sharply a roar of sound which entered the Close by a street
leading from the city square, and, falling upon the building, was flung back upon him (Hardy 1998:
75).

Kiedy stał, obecność murów katedry została mu objawiona nie tyle za pomocą wzroku co słuchu; nie
mógł ich ujrzeć, ale wyraźnie odbijały huk dochodzący ulicami do zaułku z miejskiego placu, i który
uderzając w budowlę, głośnym echem wracał do niego.

The concrete terminology in the ST denoting parts of the body, ear end eyes, is replaced in the TT by
means of the abstract concepts related with senses, słuch and wzrok, after implementing the
"modulation" procedure (Newmark 1988: 88).

The roar of sound together with the echo phenomenon in the ST is described by means of
personification. This figurative use of language in the ST, requiring semantic anomaly, which in SL is
to certain extent validated, makes it impossible for its TL equivalents to be compatible and to collocate
with each other. Therefore, the verb fling together with its passive form is lost in translation, after
modulating it and providing its "functional equivalent" głośnym echem wracał do niego (Newmark
1988: 83).

In the natural order of things Raye would have arrived at the latter place on Monday afternoon; but it
was not till the middle of Wednesday that his gown and grey wig, curled in tiers, in the best fashion of
Assyrian bas-reliefs, were seen blowing and bobbing behind him as he hastily walked up the High
Street from his lodgings (Hardy 1998: 82).
Przy normalnym obrocie spraw, Raye przyjechałby tam już w poniedziałkowe popołudnie; lecz jego
toga i szara peruka, fryzowana w loki, na najlepszy styl reliefów asyryjskich, które powiewały i
podskakiwały za nim, widziane były dopiero w drugiej połowie środy, kiedy pospiesznie kroczył ulicą
High Street ze swojej kwatery.

vs

Przy normalnym obrocie spraw, Raye przyjechałby tam już w poniedziałkowe popołudnie; lecz
dopiero w drugiej połowie środy można było zobaczyć jego togę i szarą perukę, fryzowaną w loki, na
najlepszy styl reliefów asyryjskich, które powiewały i podskakiwały za nim, kiedy pospiesznie kroczył
ulicą High Street ze swojej kwatery.

Another use of the passive voice for describing the physical phenomena or objects but with more
emphasis put on the sensual perception of such phenomena and objects, rather than on them per se,
may be rendered without "modulation" of this category as [toga i szara peruka] widziane były, which
is less natural, obvious alternative for unmarked można było zobaczyć [jego togę i szarą perukę]
(Newmark 1988: 88).

3.1.2 The second mode of the passive voice

While he stood the presence of the Cathedral walls was revealed rather by the ear than by the eyes (...)
(Hardy 1998: 75).

Kiedy stał, obecność murów katedry została mu objawiona nie tyle za pomocą wzroku co słuchu (...).

The translator's choice is to render the passive, marking the Cathedral agency, and in order to transfer
this religious connotation of a verb reveal through a somewhat awkward in a combination with a
passive mode construction, instead of translating it for a more popular została odkryta (was
discovered), which allocates the agency to the character instead of the building, and additionally
devoids the Cathedral, as a place of cult, its ability of bringing the presence of divine to the man.

3.1.3 The reflexive mode

There was a strange anxiety in her manner which did not escape Mrs. Harnham, and ultimately
resolved itself into a flood of tears (Hardy 1998: 87).

W jej zachowaniu był dziwny niepokój, który nie umknął pani Harnham i który ostatecznie
przekształcił się w powódź łez.

The distinction between the reflexive and non-reflexive mode in Polish is more blurred as the use of
pronoun się with a verb is obligatory in the reflexive mode, unlike in English, where reflexive
pronouns serve only emphatic function and usually may be omitted. Hence, the equivalent of resolved
itself, przekształcił się, would not be different from the translation of the verb resolved alone, and the
syntactically transferred by Hardy meaning in the original is lost in the TT.

The musical instrument around which and to whose tones the riders revolved, directed its trumpet-
mouths of brass upon the young man, and the long plate-glass mirrors set at angles, which revolved
with the machine, flashed the gyrating personages and hobby-horses kaleidoscopically into his eyes
(Hardy 1998: 76).
Instrument muzyczny, wokół którego i do którego tonów kręcili się pasażerowie, skierował dzwony
swych mosiężnych trąb na młodego mężczyznę, a długie, szklane, lustrzane płyty ustawione pod
kątem, które rotowały wraz z maszyną, odbijały mu kalejdoskopowo przesuwane, wirujące postacie i
koniki na patykach.

The reflexive mode of the verb flash, drawing on its transitive meaning, "to show something for a
short time," is applied to personify the moving machine, underline its autonomy and force. Reflexivity
of flash is additionally lexically enhanced by the verb's adjunct into his eyes and must be, in Berman's
terms, clarified in Polish as odbijać (reflect), given that the natural equivalent of flash used transitively
would be pokazać, which hardly collocates with mirrors due to the verb's "semantic componential
analysis" [+ANIMATE] (Berman 2000: 289). Both Polish verbs, however, cannot be modified by the
adjunct [pokazywały mu] do oczu or [odbijały mu] do oczu, as both these verbs imply being seen by
the perceiving object, and in juxtaposition with do oczu (into his eyes) would result in tautology of a
kind, and the reflexive mode of flash, though rendered, is weakened in the translation.

(Newmark 1988: 90)

(Brinton & Brinton 2010: 250-260)

3.1.4 Terminology designating an unknown object

Then the pleasure-machine started again, and, to the light-hearted girl, the figure of the handsome
young man, the market-square with its lights and crowd, the houses beyond, and the world at large,
began moving round as before, countermoving in the revolving mirrors on her right hand, she being as
it were the fixed point in an undulating, dazzling, lurid universe, in which loomed forward most
prominently of all the form of her late interlocutor (Hardy 1998: 78).

Następnie maszyna przyjemności znów ruszyła, i dla beztroskiej dziewczyny sylwetka przystojnego,
młodego mężczyzny, plac targowy wraz ze znajdującymi się tam światłami i tłumem ludzi, domy w
oddali, i ogólnie cały świat zaczęły obracać się jak wcześniej – a w kręcących się po jej prawej stronie
lustrach – w stronę przeciwną. Była niczym stały punkt w tym falującym, olśniewającym i jaskrawym
wszechświecie, w którym to najwyraźniej widniała postać ubiegłego rozmówcy.

Both figure and form [+/-ANIMATE], [+/-HUMAN] in the ST are distinctive terms in that they have a
broader scope of referents, denoting not only humans or even animals but also inanimate objects, thus
enhancing the perceived object's unfamiliarity and alienness. Sylwetka [+ANIMATE], [+/-HUMAN]
and postać [+ANIMATE], [+HUMAN] narrow down significantly this referential field, denoting
solely animate objects. However, rendering the figure of the handsome young man as figura
przystojnego, młodego mężczyzny would appear to be a less favourable translation solution, bringing
into the Polish reader's mind a connotation of either an artistic physical object or artistic representation
of human body rather than a human shape. In the same manner, synonymous to figure, form, lacks its
Polish equivalent that would allow this inanimate interpretation and requires an even less obvious
translation choice since it precludes translating it as forma, which in Polish is used solely for
inanimate objects, and in context of their appearance.

(Newmark 1988: 90)

(Brinton & Brinton 2010: 250-260)

In the course of half an hour a figure opened the door of the apartment.
‘Ah—who’s that?’ she said, starting up, for it was dark.
‘Your husband—who should it be?’ said the worthy merchant.
‘Ah—my husband!—I forgot I had a husband!’ she whispered to herself (Hardy 1998: 95).

W ciągu pół godziny jakaś postać otworzyła drzwi do mieszkania.

– Ach… kto to? – powiedziała, zrywając się do drzwi, bo było ciemno.
– Twój mąż – a kto inny? – zapytał dostojny kupiec.
– Ach… mój mąż! – Zapomniałam, że mam męża! – Szepnęła do siebie.

The unknown object is again introduced by Hardy as figure and this time rendered in the TL as postać
[+/-MOVING] rather than sylwetka [-MOVING], given the context in which this object moves; postać
differs in this term from sylwetka in that the former would not hold the role of an active, moving
agent, and additionally, there is no prepositional phrase after a figure serving the function of a
postmodifier of the noun. The unfamiliarity of the object entering the visual field of the perceiver is
emphasised by the use of the indefinite article, which cannot be disregarded in the translation process,
and the quality of the object's indefiniteness is marked in the TT as jakaś [postać].

(Newmark 1988: 90)

(Brinton & Brinton 2010: 250-260)

Dreading the moment when the inexorable stoker, grimily lurking behind the glittering rococo-work,
should decide that this set of riders had had their pennyworth, and bring the whole concern of steam-
engine, horses, mirrors, trumpets, drums, cymbals, and suchlike to pause and silence, he waited for her
every reappearance, glancing indifferently over the intervening scenes, including the two plainer
girls, the old woman and child, the two youngsters, the newly-married couple, the old man with a clay
pipe, the sparkish youth with a ring, the young ladies in the chariot, the pair of journeyman-carpenters,
and others, till his select country beauty followed on again in her place. He had never seen a fairer
product of nature, and at each round she made a deeper mark in his sentiments (Hardy 1998: 77).

Z trwogą antycypując moment, w którym nieubłagany palacz kotłowy, czyhając ponuro zza lśniącego
dzieła rokokowego, zdecyduje, że ta kolejka jeźdźców dostała już równowartość ich jednego pensa,
zatrzyma i uciszy cały koncern silników parowych, konie, lustra, trąby, bębny, cymbały i tym
podobne, czekał, na każde jej ponowne pojawienie się, spoglądając obojętnie na to, co w międzyczasie
było przed jego oczami, w tym na dwie mniej ładne dziewczyny, starą kobietę i dziecko, dwóch
młodzieńców, parę nowożeńców, starca z glinianą fajką, parę młodych z obrączką, młode damy w
rydwanie, parę zawodowych cieśli i na wielu innych, aż upatrzona przez niego wiejska piękność
dotarła z powrotem na swoje miejsce. Nigdy nie widział piękniejszego tworu natury, a z każdym
obrotem wywierała coraz większy wpływ na jego uczucia.

After conducting a componential analysis of the words dread [+FUTURE], [+FEAR] and bać się
[+FEAR], the former one has an additional sense component [+FUTURE], hence the translator may
add up the semantic features of the two terms in the TL: antycypować [+FUTURE] and trwoga
[+FEAR], to equal the semantic components of the two separate lexical units with the semes of the one
ST word (dread).
(Newmark 1988: 90)

(Brinton & Brinton 2010: 250-260)

Increase in words and information is necessary when rendering into Polish the term stoker, as in
English there exists such separate lexeme denoting this particular profession only, whereas its obvious
one-to-one equivalent, palacz, may refer both to the person whose job is to add fuel to a closed fire,
and, in most cases, to the person who is addicted to smoking. Therefore, after the implementation of
the "expansion" procedure to narrow down the semantic field for the equivalence in meaning, palacz
kotłowy is introduced in the TT (Newmark 1988: 90).

Anna looked attractive in the somewhat fashionable clothes which Mrs. Harnham had helped her to
buy, though not quite so attractive as, an innocent child, she had appeared in her country gown on the
back of the wooden horse at Melchester Fair (Hardy 1998: 91).

Anna wyglądała atrakcyjnie w dosyć modnych ubraniach, które pomogła jej kupić pani Harnham,
choć nie tak atrakcyjnie jak wtedy, gdy, jako niewinne dziecko, pojawiła się w swojej wiejskiej sukni
na grzbiecie drewnianego konia podczas festynu w Melchesterze.

3.1.5 The counterfactual

They were her own impassioned and pent-up ideas – lowered to monosyllabic phraseology in order to
keep up the disguise – that Edith put into letters signed with another name, much to the shallow Anna's
delight, who, unassisted, could not for the world have conceived such pretty fancies for winning him,
even had she been able to write them (Hardy 1998: 87).

Były to jej własne namiętne i stłumione myśli – uproszczone do monosylabowej frazeologii w celu
utrzymania kamuflażu – które Edith umieściła w listach podpisanych innym imieniem, ku płytkiej
radości Anny, która bez pomocy za nic w świecie nie wymyśliłaby takich pięknych fantazji, żeby go
zdobyć, nawet gdyby była w stanie je napisać.

Raye wrote, in his real name, what he would never have decided to write on his own responsibility;
namely that he could not live without her, and would come down in the spring and shelve her looming
difficulty by marrying her (Hardy 1998: 89).

Raye napisał w swoim prawdziwym imieniu to, czego nigdy nie zdecydowałby się napisać na własną
odpowiedzialność; mianowicie, że nie mógł bez niej żyć, że przyjedzie na wiosnę i położy kres
czekającym ją trudnościom, poślubiając ją.

As he stood smiling there in the motley crowd, with his pipe in his hand, and clad in the rough pea-
jacket and wideawake that he had put on for his stroll, who would have supposed him to be Charles
Bradford Raye, Esquire, stuff-gownsman, educated at Wintoncester, called to the Bar at Lincoln's Inn,
now going the Western Circuit, merely detained in Melchester by a small arbitration after his brethren
had moved on to the next county-town? (Hardy 1998: 78)

Kto by przypuszczał, że ów mężczyzna, który tak stał, uśmiechając się pośród tego różnorodnego
tłumu, z fajką w ręku, ubrany w szorstki płaszcz marynarski i kapelusz z niską koroną i szerokim
rondem, to Karol Bradford Raye, giermek, wykształcony w Wintoncester młodszy adwokat, który
został przyjęty do adwokatury w Lincoln's Inn, a który obecnie udając się do Okręgu Zachodniego,
zatrzymał się w Melchesterze jedynie z racji małego arbitrażu po tym, jak jego współpracownicy
przenieśli się do sąsiadującego hrabstwa?

Both pea-jacket defined as "a sailor's short heavy double-breasted overcoat of navy wool," and

wideawake, "a hat with a low crown and very wide brim" are culturally rooted terms, denoting popular
in the nineteenth-century England parts of garments which do not have their one-to-one
correspondents, and are rendered in the TT as płaszcz marynarski and kapelusz z niską koroną i
szerokim rondem and are "descriptive equivalents" of the original terms (Newmark 1988: 83-84).

The word stuff-gownsman, interchangeably used with junior, is an archaic legal term denoting a
barrister who, unlike a silkman, a barrister wearing a silk gown, has not attained the rank of Queen's
Counsel and wears a gown made of other, less exclusive material. "Through-translations" of those
words: ludzie w togach ze zwykłego materiału, juniorzy or jedwabnicy do not function as recognised
terms and neither give the reader their description nor inform the reader of their function, and would
have to be accompanied by additional information supplied by the translator in the form of footnotes,
for example (Newmark 1988: 84-85). Hence, probably the best solution would be to introduce in the
TT the "functional equivalent," młodszy adwokat (Newmark 1988: 83). Such solution may be
juxtaposed with another technique – a "descriptive equivalence," which, requiring a long explanation,
would to a great extent hinder the process of reading the already syntactically complex sentence, at the
same time not providing the reader with crucial to the story load of information on the judicial system
of the nineteenth-century England (Newmark 1988: 83-84).

3.1.6 The speculative form

The conversation was indeed theirs only, Anna being as a domestic animal who humbly heard but
understood not. Raye seemed startled in awakening to this fact, and began to feel dissatisfied with her
inadequacy (Hardy 1998: 92).

Rozmowa rzeczywiście toczyła się tylko między nimi; Anna zachowywała się jak zwierzę domowe,
które pokornie się przysłuchiwało, lecz nie rozumiało. Raye wydawał się być zaskoczony tym faktem i
zaczął odczuwać niezadowolenie z nieporadności dziewczyny.

Whether an inkling of Anna’s circumstances reached the knowledge of Mrs. Harnham’s husband or
not cannot be said, but the girl was compelled, in spite of Edith’s entreaties, to leave the house (Hardy
1998: 88).

Czy mąż pani Harnham domyślił się sytuacji Anny, czy też nie – nie wiadomo – ale dziewczyna była
zmuszona, pomimo usilnych próśb Edyty, opuścić dom.

Their motions were so rhythmical that they seemed to be moved by machinery. And it presently
appeared that they were moved by machinery indeed (Hardy 1998: 75).

Ich ruchy były tak rytmiczne, że wydawały się być wprawiane w ruch przez maszynerię. Obecnie
okazało się, że rzeczywiście poruszały nimi maszyny.

At length the couple turned from the roundabout towards the door of Mrs. Harnham's house, and the
young man could be heard saying that he would accompany her home. Anna, then, had found a lover,
apparently a very devoted one (Hardy 1998: 80).

W końcu para odeszła od karuzeli i skierowała się w stronę drzwi pani Harnham, i dało się słyszeć, jak
młodzieniec mówi, że odprowadzi ją do domu. Anna znalazła więc kochanka, jakby się mogło
wydawać, bardzo oddanego.

Apparently in English is used for something that seems to be true based on what one knows, has seen
or heard, although it is not certain, but given the plot of the short story, which revolves around
deception, the appearances from the point of view of the characters, more often than not, prove to be
wrong, in which case rendering apparent into its Polish obvious equivalents najwidoczniej or
najwyraźniej would be inappropriate, as the thing supposed turns out to be false. Hence, rarer and less
common expression jakby się mogło wydawać is proposed, which better reflects the original meaning,
forcing the reader to question what only "appears" to be.

He had really a tender regard for the country girl, and it grew more tender than ever when he found her
apparently capable of expressing the deepest sensibilities in the simplest words (Hardy 1998: 89).

W istocie obdarzył wiejską dziewczynę czułymi względami, które przerodziły się w prawdziwe
uczucie, kiedy okazało się, że ta, jak sądził, zdolna jest wyrażać najgłębsze emocje za pomocą
najprostszych słów.

In the same manner as in the previous commentary, one meaning of apparently is enhanced in its
translation to jak sądził, except now, the supposition of what is considered true is subjectivised, as
originally it only appears to Raye that the girl is literate and educated.

3.2 Dialect

The features of the Dorset dialect and social dialect apparent in Anna's speech can be marked in
translation as a nonstandard variety of Polish, however those TL dialect markers do not need to be
rendered in the same fragments of the TT as those dialectal features in the ST but in other parts
through the "compensation" procedure, where such alteration is possible for the translator to be
introduced (Newmark 1988: 90).

The young man drew up to the side of her steed, and pleasantly asked her if she had enjoyed her ride.
'O yes!' she said, with dancing eyes. 'It has been quite unlike anything I have ever felt in my life
before!' (Hardy 1998: 77)

Młody mężczyzna podszedł do jej rumaka i uprzejmie zapytał, czy podobała jej się jazda.
– Och tak! – odparła z radością w oczach. – Niezwykłe przeżycie!

'Why do you laugh, dear?' said he.

'Because – you are so genteel that you must have plenty o' money, and only say that for fun!' she
returned (Hardy 1998: 78).

– Dlaczego się śmiejesz, moja droga? – powiedział.

– Bo – Pan taki elegancki jest i pewnikiem ma sporo pieniożków i mówi tak tylko dla żartu! –
odpowiedziała.

The loss of final consonantal sound in o' (of), as a dialectal feature of the Dorset community, is
compensated with diminutive lexicalisation, to render indicative of this stylisation naivety and
childishness, traits so accurately representing Anna's attitude and demeanour throughout the story, and
rusticalisation. Some features of the southeastern borderland Polish dialect as denasalisation of nasal
vowels (pieniożków instead of pieniążków) are ascribed to the character. Additionally, the word
pewnikiem (na pewno) is used as a feature of rural nonstandard speech which, rather than being a
matter of a specific dialect, is used more universally in geographical terms, and the archaic syntactic
variation is employed with the verb at the end of the sentence to enhance the rustical quality, as
dialects containing archaic traits are more closely related with everything that is undeveloped and
therefore left out educationally and economically, that is, with rural parts of the nation.

'Hasn't Anna come in?' asked Mrs. Harnham.

'No m'm.'
'She ought to be in by this time. I meant her to go for ten minutes only.'
'Shall I go and look for her, m'm?' said the housemaid alertly (Hardy 1998: 79).

– Anna nie przyszła? – zapytała Lady Harnham.

– Nie, psz... pani.
– Powinna być już w domu. Pozwoliłam jej wyjść tylko na dziesięć minut.
– Iść jej poszukać, psz... pani? – czujnie odparła służąca.

The phonological dialect marker, ma'am or its even more abridged spelling version m'm, consisting in
the loss of a medial consonant, may be indicative of either the protagonists' conformism to features of
pronunciation established and practised by the dwellers of a particular region, Dorset, or more
generally, of colloquial variety of language, popular especially among the lower social classes, but
also of characters' rural origin. Both versions are used in the representation of Anna and Mrs
Harnham's maid speech, respectively, which corresponds, in the former character's case, with her
lower social standing (colloquial speech) as well as with the fact of her being "a country girl," and in
the latter's case, also to the woman's lower status and her geographical roots, Melchester. Hence, the
dialectal features of colloquial speech, involving among others all sorts of elliptical forms and
contractions, may be assigned to the both of the protagonists, not distorting at the same time the text's
integrity. After the procedure of colloquialisation performed on the TL text, such expressions as
ma'am or its more abridged versions are rendered, in most cases of their occurrences in the original, as
psze...pani or psz...pani.

'Anna,' said Mrs. Harnham, coming up. 'I've been looking at you! That young man kissed you at
parting I am almost sure.'
'Well,' stammered Anna; 'he said, if I didn't mind – it would do me no harm, and, and, him a great deal
of good!'
'Ah, I thought so! And he was a stranger till tonight?'
'Yes ma'am.'
'Yet I warrant you told him your name and everything about yourself?'
'He asked me.'
'But he didn't tell you his?'
'Yes ma'am, he did!' cried Anna victoriously. 'It is Charles Bradford, of London.'
'Well, if he's respectable, of course I've nothing to say against your knowing him,' remarked her
mistress, prepossessed, in spite of general principles, in the young man's favour. 'But I must reconsider
all that, if he attempts to renew your acquaintance. A country-bred girl like you, who has never lived
in Melchester till this month, who had hardly ever seen a black-coated man till you came here, to be so
sharp as to capture a young Londoner like him!'
'I didn't capture him. I didn't do anything,' said Anna, in confusion (Hardy 1998: 81).

– Anno – powiedziała pani Harnham, podchodząc do niej. – Przyglądałam się wam! Ten młodzieniec
pocałował cię na pożegnanie, jestem tego prawie pewna.
– No... – zająknęła się Anna – powiedział, że jeśli nie miałabym nic przeciwko – to mi by to nie
zaszkodziło, a, a jemu bardzo dobrze zrobiło!
– Ach, tak myślałam! I nie znałaś go wcześniej?
– Nie, psze... pani.
– Lecz ty zapewne mu się przedstawiłaś i opowiedziałaś wszystko o sobie?
– Pytał mnie.
– A on ci nie powiedział, jak się nazywa?
– Powiedział! – krzyknęła Anna zwycięsko. – To Karol Bradford z Londynu.
– No dobrze, jeśli jest szanowany, to oczywiście nie będę mieć nic przeciwko twojej znajomości z nim
– odparła jej pani, sympatyzując tym samym, wbrew ogólnej zasadzie, z młodym mężczyzną. – Ale
muszę jeszcze to wszystko przemyśleć, jeśli będzie próbował się ponownie z tobą spotkać. Kto by
pomyślał, żeby to wiejska dziewczyna, taka jak ty, która tego miesiąca nie licząc, nigdy nie mieszkała
w Melchesterze, i która w ogóle nie widziała żadnego mężczyzny w urzędowym stroju odkąd tu
przyjechała, była na tyle sprytna, by zwabić młodego Londyńczyka, takiego jak on!
– Nie zwabiłam go! Ja nic nie zrobiłam! – krzyknęła zmieszana Anna.

To return now to the moment at which Anna, at Melchester, had received Raye's letter.
It had been put into her own hand by the postman on his morning rounds. She flushed down to her
neck on receipt of it, and turned it over and over. 'It is mine?' she said.
'Why, yes, can't you see it is?' said the postman, smiling as he guessed the nature of the document and
the cause of the confusion.
'O yes, of course!' replied Anna, looking at the letter, forcedly tittering, and blushing still more (Hardy
1998: 84).

Wracając teraz do chwili, gdy Anna w Melchesterze otrzymała list od Raye'a – przekazany został do
jej rąk przez listonosza podczas porannego obchodu. Oblała się rumieńcem aż po samą szyję przy
odbieraniu listu, i w kółko oglądała obie jego strony.
– To mój? – zapytała.
– Tak. Nie widzi, że to do niej? – powiedział listonosz, uśmiechając się, zdawszy sobie sprawę z
charakteru tejże korespondencji i przyczyny zakłopotania
– Ach tak, oczywiście! – odpowiedziała jeszcze bardziej zarumieniona Anna, spoglądając na list i
podśmiewując się nienaturalnie.

The absence of inversion in a question also qualifies as a part of speech variation indicative of a lower
social status, and a feature of oral discourse, which, in turn, by some researchers in dialect studies, is
acknowledged as a nonstandard discourse. Lack of inversion in Polish morphology reduces the
number of translational options to render such syntactic nonstandard variations common for oral
discourse and the dialectal feature of syntactic plane of language use is neutralised.

In order to compensate for the loss of the previous oral discourse feature, another may be introduced
through the partial colloquialisation and relativisation of honorifics encoded morphologically in the
third person singular, omitting the full standard construction with pan/pani.

'How dismal you seem this morning, Anna. What's the matter?'
'I'm not dismal, I'm glad; only I –' She stopped to stifle a sob.
'Well?'
'I've got a letter – and what good is it to me, if I can't read a word in it!'
'Why, I'll read it, child, if necessary.'
'But this is from somebody – I don't want anybody to read it but myself!' Anna murmured.
'I shall not tell anybody. Is it from that young man?'
'I think so.' Anna slowly produced the letter, saying: 'Then will you read it to me, ma'am?' (Hardy
1998: 84)

– Cały dzisiejszy poranek jesteś taka ponura, Anno. Co się stało?

– Nie jestem ponura, cieszę się; tylko – przerwała, tłumiąc płacz.
– Więc jak?
– Dostałam list – ale co mi po nim, skoro nie mogę przeczytać w nim ani słowa!
– Ja przeczytam, jeśli trzeba, dziecko.
– Ale on jest od kogoś – nie chcę, by ktoś go czytał oprócz mnie! Wymamrotała Anna.
– Nikomu nie powiem. Jest od tego młodzieńca?
– Tak mi się wydaję. – Anna powoli wyciągnęła list, mówiąc – Przeczytasz mi go zatem, pani?

'Now – you'll do it for me, won't you, dear mistress?' said Anna eagerly. 'And you'll do it as well as
ever you can, please? Because I couldn't bear him to think I am not able to do it myself. I should sink
into the earth with shame if he knew that!' (Hardy 1998: 85)

– Zrobisz to dla mnie, droga pani, prawda? – zapytała zapalczywie. – I zrobisz to, jak najlepiej
potrafisz, proszę? Bo nie zniosłabym tego, gdyby pomyślał sobie, że sama nie umiem mu odpisać.
Spaliłabym się ze wstydu, jeśliby się o tym dowiedział!

The Dorset dialect markers: shall (instead of will) and should (instead of would) are neutralised given
that they do not diverge from the written discourse, and in line with Pinto's findings, as lexical
features, represent the lowest level of deviation from the standard discourse (Pinto 2009: 299).

'Won't you at least put your name yourself?' she said. 'You can manage to write that by this time?'
'No, no,' said Anna, shrinking back. 'I should do it so bad. He'd be ashamed of me, and never see me
again!' (Hardy 1998: 86)

– Nie możesz przynajmniej sama się podpisać? – powiedziała. – Tyle już chyba umiesz napisać?
– Nie, nie – powiedziała Anna, odskakując do tyłu. – Tak okropni by mi to wyszło. Wstydziłby się za
mnie i już nigdy by się ze mno nie chciał zobaczyć!

The prospect of Charles questioning her impeccable writing skills, let alone literacy, stirs in Anna
great emotions and, being in a situation "prone to revealing one's first language" or mother dialect, the
girl resorts to regionalect more regularly than in her previous utterances, on the lexical level: choosing
the marked form of would, phonological: omitting the final consonantal sound, syntactical: replacing
the Saxon genitive with the prepositional phrase (Berezowski 1997: 60). Additionally, overwhelmed
with emotions, Anna's register becomes less formal, and the fact that she speaks "from her heart" and
honestly is signified by the features of oral discourse such as morphologically incorrect word
derivation. All these nonstandard and oral features of discourse may be again rusticalised along the
southeastern borderland variety of Polish: the shortening of open vowels in unstressed word-endings
(okropni) and the denasalisation of nasal vowels (mno).

'All I want is that niceness you can so well put into your letters, my dear, dear mistress, and that I can't
for the life o' me make up out of my own head; though I mean the same thing and feel it exactly when
you've written it down!' (Hardy 1998: 87-88)

– Chcę jedynie tej czułości, którą tak dobrze umiesz przekazać w swoich listach, moja droga, droga
pani, i której za nic w świecie nie mogłabym sama wymyślić; mimo, iż mam na myśli i czuję
dokładnie to samo, co ty, gdy już to zapiszesz!

‘O Anna!’ replied Mrs. Harnham. ‘I think we must tell him all – that I have been doing your writing
for you? – lest he should not know it till after you become his wife, and it might lead to dissension and
recriminations –’
‘O mis’ess, dear mis’ess – please don’t tell him now!’ cried Anna in distress. ‘If you were to do it,
perhaps he would not marry me; and what should I do then? It would be terrible what would come to
me! And I am getting on with my writing, too. I have brought with me the copybook you were so good
as to give me, and I practise every day, and though it is so, so hard, I shall do it well at last, I believe,
if I keep on trying.’
‘You do it so beautifully,’ continued Anna, ‘and say all that I want to say so much better than I could
say it, that I do hope you won’t leave me in the lurch just now!’
‘Very well,’ replied the other. ‘But I—but I thought I ought not to go on!’
‘Why?’
Her strong desire to confide her sentiments led Edith to answer truly:
‘Because of its effect upon me.’
‘But it CAN’T have any!’
‘Why, child?’
‘Because you are married already!’ said Anna with lucid simplicity (Hardy 1998: 90-91).

– Ach Anno! – odpowiedziała pani Harnham. – Myślę, że musimy mu wszystko powiedzieć – że

pisałam za ciebie – aby dowiedział się o tym, zanim jeszcze zostaniesz jego żoną, i uniknąć wszelkiej
niezgody i oskarżeń –
– Ach pani, droga pani – proszę, nie mów mu teraz! – zawołała Anna z rozpaczy. – Gdybyś to
łuczyniła, być może nie poślubiłby mni; i co bym wtedy poczęła? To byłoby straszne, co by mni
spotkało! I moje pisanie także coraz lepiej mi idzie. Przyniosłam ze sobą zeszyt, który byłaś tak dobra
mi dać, i ćwiczę każdego dnia i chociaż jest to tak bardzo, bardzo trudne, myślę, że w końcu mi to
wyjdzie dobrze, jeśli będę dalej próbować.
– Tak pięknie to robisz – ciągnęła Anna – i piszesz wszystko to, co ja bym chciała napisać, ale o wiele
lepiej, niż ja bym to zrobiła; dlatego mam nadzieję, że nie zostawisz mnie teraz na lodzie!
– No dobrze – odpowiedziała. – Ale ja – pomyślałam sobie, że nie powinnam już dalej tego robić!”
– Dlaczego?
Jej silne pragnienie, by zwierzyć się ze swoich uczuć spowodowało, że Edyta odpowiedziała jej
szczerze:
– Z powodu wpływu jaki to na mnie ma.
– Ale to NIE MOŻE mieć żadnego!
– Dlaczego, dziecko?”
– Ponieważ jesteś już mężatką! – powiedziała Anna prostolinijnie.

Again, the Dorset dialect starts to break through when Anna speculates what would happen if her
secret was revealed. Omission of a medial consonantal sound, the marked use of the modal shall, and
addition of semantically empty auxiliary do are not only locus of social deixis but also characters'
psychological state. In order to retrieve the emotional intensity, some southeastern borderland Polish
dialect spelling markers: the shortening of open vowels in unstressed word-endings (mni) and the
labialisation of word-initial back vowels (łuczyniła) are applied in the translation.

‘Anna,’ he said, staring; ‘what’s this?’

‘It only means—that I can’t do it any better!’ she answered, through her tears.
‘Eh? Nonsense!’
‘I can’t!’ she insisted, with miserable, sobbing hardihood. ‘I—I— didn’t write those letters, Charles! I
only told HER what to write! And not always that! But I am learning, O so fast, my dear, dear
husband! And you’ll forgive me, won’t you, for not telling you before?’ (Hardy 1998: 92-93)

– Anno – powiedział z wytrzeszczonymi oczami – co to jest?

– To tylko znaczy… że nie umiem tego lepiej zrobić! – Odpowiedziała przez łzy.
– Ech? Nonsens!
– Nie umiem! – Upierała się zuchwale, żałośnie szlochając. – Ja – ja – nie napisałam tych listów,
Karolu! Mówiłam jej tylko, co ma pisać! I nie zawsze tak było! Ale ja się uczę, i to tak szybko, mój
drogi, drogi mężu! A ty mi wybaczysz, prawda, że nie powiedziałam ci o tym wcześniej?

‘I missed you at the station,’ he continued. ‘Did you see Anna safely tied up? I hope so, for ‘twas
time.’ (Hardy 1998: 95)

– Nie było cie na dworcu – kontynuował. – Łupewniłaś sie, że Anna szczęśliwie sie wydała? Mam
tako nadzieje, bo był już na to czas.

The dialect occasionally also appears in the speech of such secondary characters as Mr Harnham,
when Hardy spells the weakened form of it was, which is indicative of colloquial Dorset variety,
pointing the reader to the incompatibility of the Harnhams that stems from distinct social strata to
which spouses belong. Edith's husband's lower status also shows in his colloquial use of tied up to
mean married. This nonstandard speech is rusticalised as the regionalect, through the denasalisation
and labialisation of proper sounds, and colloquialised on the lexical level: wydała się used instead of
unmarked wyszła za mąż.

‘What are you doing, dear Charles?’ she said timidly from the other window, and drew nearer to him
as if he were a god.
‘Reading over all those sweet letters to me signed “Anna,”‘ he replied with dreary resignation (Hardy
1998: 95).

– Co robisz, drogi Karolu? – zapytała nieśmiało z drugiego okna i zbliżyła się do niego, jakby był
bogiem.
– Czytam te wszystkie słodkie listy do mnie podpisane „Anna” – odpowiedział z ponurą rezygnacją.

3.3 Legal language exposed through FID

Hardy, providing a short cut to the characters' inner state and way of thinking, employs legal
discourse, of which, Raye, as a lawyer, makes use of not only in a professional context but also in his
love life and involvement with women. The law plays an important role in the life of all of the
characters in the story. Its significance is also evident in the work's criticism and interpretation.
Hardy's rejection of two legally unrelated titles considered by him for the story: "The Amanuensis"
and "The writer of the Letters" supports this view. Apart from the very title "On the Western Circuit,"
legal language is systematically used throughout the whole narrative. Moreover, this exposure of the
character's legal habits of thought and legalese, deliberately used by the author through the blending of
two perspectives "invites the reader to analyse events as though in a court room" (Brady 1982: 125).
Hence, transferring this type of official language ought to be a matter of priority for the translator.
What is more, this type of semantically relevant legal vocabulary, regularly employed throughout the
text, constitutes what may be considered in Berman's terms "underlying networks of signification" and
neglecting such linguistic behaviour would result in deformation (Berman 2000: 292-293).

He could not single out any one sentence and say it was at all remarkable or clever; the ensemble of
the letter it was which won him; and beyond the one request that he would write or come to her again
soon there was nothing to show her sense of a claim upon him (Hardy 1998: 84).

Nie potrafił wskazać ani jednego zdania, o którym powiedziałby, że jest jakieś niezwykłe czy mądre;
to całokształt listu go urzekł; i poza jedną prośbą o rychłą odpowiedź bądź odwiedziny, nie było nic,
co świadczyłoby o tym, że ma wobec niego jakieś roszczenia.
But, O my cruel one, I think I have one claim upon you!’ (Hardy 1998: 94)

Lecz, o moja okrutna, wydaję mi się, że mam wobec ciebie jedno roszczenie!

Sense of a claim upon and one claim upon are both translated into Polish as roszczenia and roszczenie,
respectively, without losing the main legal context in which they are used. "Transposition" is
implemented in the translation of the first phrase with claim, accounting for the frequency in the
Polish corpora with which the noun occurs in the plural, which is twice as high as that of the noun in
the singular (Newmark 1988: 85).

'Why, yes, can't you see it is?' said the postman, smiling as he guessed the nature of the document and
the cause of the confusion (Hardy 1998: 84).

– Tak. Nie widzi, że to do niej? – powiedział listonosz, uśmiechając się, odgadnąwszy charakter ów
dokumentu i przyczynę zakłopotania dziewczyny.

Anna was broken with grief; but by Mrs. Harnham's counsel strictly refrained from hurling at him the
reproaches and bitterness customary from young women so situated (Hardy 1998: 87).

Anna była załamana i pełna żalu, ale zgodnie z poradą pani Harnham, powstrzymała się od rzucania
gorzkich i pełnych oskarżeń słów pod jego adresem, które zwyczajowo padały z ust młodych panien
znajdujących się w podobnym jej położeniu.

The word counsel is another word associated with legal jargon: apart from its meaning of a piece of
advice usually given by a knowledgeable person, it also denotes a profession of
"a lawyer who gives someone legal advice and represents them in a court of law," and therefore the
term is used also as a piece of legal advice. Moreover, the word counselling alone, means "advice and
support given by a counsellor." With no exact equivalent to choose in a TL vocabulary, the obvious
synonymy would be rada or, less general, zalecenie, that additionally has associations with a piece of
advice from a person with a particular field of expertise, which is not law, i.e. doctor (zalecenie
lekarza). The most appropriate equivalent here then, seems to be porada, which in national corpus is
found to collocate with the adjunct prawna nearly five times as much as with lekarska.

It may well be supposed that Anna's own feelings had not been quite in accord with these generous
expressions; but the mistress's judgment had ruled, and Anna had acquiesced (Hardy 1998: 87).

Jak można było przypuszczać, Anny własne uczucia nie współbrzmiały z tymi ciepłymi słowami, ale
rozstrzygnął wyrok pani, a Anna się zgodziła.

The noun judgement as well as the verb to rule are used in a legal discourse. Hardy plays on the
lexical and phraseological ambiguity of the sentence. The author, exploiting the word's polysemy,
juxtaposes the contextually fitting meaning of judgement, i.e. opinion, with its legal variant, "an
official decision given by a judge or a court of law," to keep up the story's legal undertone. In similar
manner, he uses the interplay of the two meanings of the verb to rule: the first sense, logically
matching the contextual criteria: "to be the most important and controlling influence on someone," and
the second, explicit, used in a court context: "to make an official decision about something, especially
a legal problem." Also, this time on the idiomatic level, the formulaic expression: the judge/court had
ruled (sąd orzekł) is brought about in the SL reader's mind, while reading the original. In translation,
such play on both words is irretrievable, as judgement and rule only have one, the legal, sense in
common with English orzeczenie/wyrok and orzec, respectively. What is more, bringing about these
two commonly used in a court of law lexical units is impossible without changing the sense of the
original text to mean either the mistress's opinion was decisive: rozstrzygnął wyrok pani; or the
mistress had ruled: pani orzekła.

The upshot of the discussion was that though he had not been directly advised to do it, Raye wrote, in
his real name, what he would never have decided to write on his own responsibility; namely that he
could not live without her, and would come down in the spring and shelve her looming difficulty by
marrying her (Hardy 1998: 89).

Chociaż nie doradzono mu tego bezpośrednio, w wyniku dyskusji, Raye napisał w swoim
prawdziwym imieniu to, czego nigdy nie zdecydowałby się napisać na własną odpowiedzialność;
mianowicie, że nie mógł bez niej żyć, i przyjedzie na wiosnę, i położy kres czekającym ją
trudnościom, poślubiając ją.

That contract had left her still a woman whose deeper nature had never been stirred (Hardy 1998: 86).

Bycie w tym związku sprawiło, że nigdy nie udało jej się obudzić głęboko drzemiących w niej uczuć.

Hardy, by using the word contract twice throughout the short story in describing the marriages of both
women, in legal jargon, disparages this institution and diminishes its value, reducing its meaning to a
legally binding piece of paper. This callous and cynical attitude towards the marriage resonates with
the tragedy of the main character, an unhappily married woman, and foreshadows at the same time the
tragedy that is yet to unfold from another "contract" signed between the two people who are nearly
complete strangers, sharing wrong ideas about each other. The term is rendered as its equivalent in the
dictionary of legal vocabulary, umowa, only in its second application in the ST, due to the syntactic
complexity as well as the fact that the contract fulfills the role of subject and is used with a complex
transitive verb to leave. Since there is no possibility to replace the verb with this type of predicate (like
for instance: umowa pozostawiła ją kobietą?), the subject in Polish becomes an inanimate force and
enforces its semantic restrictions upon the verb. Therefore, the inanimate agent cannot collocate with
such predicates as sprawić or zdołać, which both have [+ANIMATE] as their semantic features (ta
umowa sprawiła, że nigdy nie udało jej się obudzić głęboko drzemiących w niej uczuć?). The legal
perspective employed to degrade the value of the institution of marriage cannot be relayed, given the
sentence's semantic and stylistic constraints. Another change in translation concerns the semantics of
the expressions in SL: deeper nature and the verb to stir. The former, which translates as prawdziwa
natura, would sound bizarre in the passive that here is obligatory, given the lack of an agent, which
can hardly be presupposed by the translator in this context (zawarta przez nią umowa sprawiła, że była
kobietą, której prawdziwa natura nigdy nie została odkryta?). Also, the Polish equivalents of to stir,
wywołać, poruszyć, sound awkward in the context of natura (zawarta przez nią umowa sprawiła, że
była kobietą, której głęboka natura nigdy nie została poruszona?). The more obvious collocations with
to stir are emocje (emotions) or uczucia (feelings), and taking into the account that in the original they
remain not stirred and replace deeper nature, uczucia may be modified by the adadjectival and
adnominal adjuncts: głęboko drzemiące in the Polish version.

(Newmark 1988: 90)

(Brinton & Brinton 2010: 250-260)

The contract of marriage at a registry is soon got through; but somehow, during its progress, Raye
discovered a strange and secret gravitation between himself and Anna’s friend (Hardy 1998: 91-92).
Umowa małżeńska w urzędzie szybko została sfinalizowana; ale jakimś trafem w trakcie jej
zawierania Raye odkrył dziwne i potajemne przyciąganie między nim a przyjaciółką Anny.

Although lacking in any legal connotations, gravitation also seems rather a peculiar, yet semantically
nonrandom choice of words made by the author. Through FID abundant in legalese as well as other
scientific terminology, which replace the layman's terms, Hardy exposes the character's higher social
standing and his educational superiority, especially, in comparison with the rural simple-minded and
primitive Anna. Therefore, rendering the concept taken from physics in ST as a more unmarked and
common alternative in the context of the protagonists' romantic or sexual attraction, such as poczuć
pociąg do kogoś (to feel attracted to sb) or poczuć chemię między nimi (to feel the chemistry between
them), would hinder the transfer of semantic load carried by the specialised terminology, to the target
readership. Instead wzajemne przyciąganie is proposed as a "functional equivalent" of gravitation,
which, unlike its English counterpart, attraction, is used mainly in scientific context, and appears to be
a more frequent and natural collocation than grawitacja (gravitation), a term that in Polish is solely
applied in physics (Newmark 1988: 83).

The correspondence had continued altogether for four months; and the next letter from Raye contained
incidentally a statement of his position and prospects. He said that in offering to wed her he had, at
first, contemplated the step of retiring from a profession which hitherto had brought him very slight
emolument, and which, to speak plainly, he had thought might be difficult of practice after his union
with her (Hardy 1998: 89-90).

Korespondencja trwała w sumie cztery miesiące; a następny list od Raye'a zawierał przy okazji
oświadczenie dotyczące jego stanowiska i perspektyw. Napisał, że kiedy proponował jej małżeństwo,
z początku rozważał przejście na emeryturę z zawodu, który do tej pory przynosił mu bardzo
niewielkie zarobki i który, mówiąc wprost, uznał, że może być trudny do wykonywania po wejściu z
nią w związek małżeński.

The formalities of the wedding – or rather ratification of a previous union – being concluded, the four
went in one cab to Raye’s lodgings, newly taken in a new suburb in preference to a house, the rent of
which he could ill afford just then (Hardy 1998: 92).

Po zakończeniu formalności związanych ze ślubem – a raczej ratyfikacji poprzedniego związku 31 –

czwórka pojechała jedną taksówką do mieszkania Raye'a, które niedawno wynajął na nowym
przedmieściu, zamiast domu, na którego czynsz go jeszcze wtedy nie było stać.

Apart from ratification that is used strictly in legal terms, Hardy also chooses the formal equivalent of
marriage, union to mean "the process of getting married, or the state of being married." The latter
translates into Polish either as informal małżeństwo (marriage) or equally informal związek
(relationship). The official language and its register are thus lost in the TT, as the Polish calque, unia
shares with its English counterpart only one sense of
"an organization or club for people or groups that share an interest or aim,
for example protecting the rights of particular groups."

Thoughts of unpremeditated conduct, of which a week earlier he would not have believed himself
capable, threw him into a mood of dissatisfied depression (Hardy 1998: 82).

Refleksja nad czynem popełnionym bez premedytacji, do którego jeszcze tydzień temu nie
uwierzyłby, że jest zdolny, wprawiła go w nastrój depresji i wzbudziła niezadowolenie.
The pseudonym, or rather partial name, that he had given her as his before knowing how far the
acquaintance was going to carry him, had been spoken on the spur of the moment, without any
ulterior intention whatever (Hardy 1998: 82-83).

Pseudonim, a raczej niekompletną nazwę, którą jej podał, zanim dowiedział się, jak daleko potoczy się
ta znajomość, wypowiedział pod wpływem chwili, bez żadnego ukrytego zamiaru.

Employed in "On the Western Circuit" legal vocabulary is relevant for preserving the dual voice of
FID and the interpretation of the work. According to Kristin Brady, the application of this official
language serves another important role, namely, to "heighten the story's drama and poignancy"
through objectifying the reader's feelings, which become insufficient in portraying human tragedies
(Brady, p. 125).
CONCLUSION

Thomas Hardy's longevity enabled this already prolific writer to remarkably enrich English
literature of the Victorian period. Not only is the abundance of Hardy's works exceptional but
so is the broad scope of genres he composed embracing prose, poetry and drama. Hardy's
creative versatility, however, renders the translation of his fiction, as works combining the
poetical figurativeness and elaborateness, prosaic syntactic and narrative complexity, and
dramatic elements of mimesis, a great challenge. Careful rendition of the forms employed by
Hardy, introduction of certain dialectic markers of either one or more nonstandard linguistic
variations, be that geographical, social, temporal or idiolectal, from the wide array of
Berezowski's and Pinto's dialect translation procedures, to relay the social strata and social
interrelations existing between the characters, without contaminating the original text's
integrity with TL specific socio-cultural associations absent in the ST cultural and social
reality, and preservation of TL vocabulary that carries either legal denotations or
connotations, may prove to be essential in transferring, in line with Gutt's relevance-theoretic
approach to translation studies, "communicative clues" that ultimately generate in the reader
"communicative gain" (Gutt 2000).
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Appendix 1: "'I wish he was mine!' she murmured."
Wal Paget
lithograph dropped into the letter-press
English Illustrated Magazine (December 1891: 283).
Thomas Hardy's "On the Western Circuit," later collected in Life's Little Ironies
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham