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...later came to be called aesthetic distance, that the reception of a literary work evolves from generation to generation, often acquiring, in the process, bright new horizons and accruing to the literary text constellations of reconfigured forms? Despite his deep despondency following the (oftentimes) harsh critical reception of his novels Hardy does appear to have had some faith in aesthetic distance, in the changing attitudes of his reading public, once telling his feminist friend, Millicent Garrett Fawcett, that "we are educating them by degrees." On the other hand, her own unchanging attitudes in the face of his more radical ideas must have dispirited him. In their discussion on votes for women, he explains that he is in favor of enfranchisement because the tendency of the vote will be--he thinks--
to break up the present pernicious conventions in respect of manners, customs, religion, illegitimacy, the stereotyped household (that it must be the unit of society), the father of a woman's child (that it is anybody's business but the woman's own, except in cases of disease or insanity), sport (that so-called educated men should be encouraged to harass & kill for pleasure feeble creatures by mean stratagems), slaughter-houses (that they should be dark dens of cruelty), & other matters which I got into hot water for touching on many years ago. (Letters, 3:239)
Fawcett evidently feels that "hot water" is just what she will get into if she publishes this viewpoint of Hardy's; or, as she tells him, apologetically, she fears "John Bull is not ripe for it at present."
Would that Hardy could have stepped into the twenty-first century and heard for himself the ideas presented at The Thomas Hardy Association's "Hardy at Yale" conference (June 2007) which actively demonstrated that "John Bull" is now very ripe indeed. Among the sixty-odd thought-provoking topics as contrasting as "The Humane Movement and Hardy's Poetry" and "Hardy's Progressive Conception of the Female Subject," or "Hardy's Landscapes of Desire and the Poems of 1912-1913," and "Hardy and the Science of Language," there was nothing to suggest that John Bull or Uncle Sam or the Yale Bulldog or, indeed, any representative, iconic or otherwise, of modern culture, was less than ripe and ready for the breaking up of "pernicious conventions in respect of manners, customs, religion" et al.
When Hardy abandoned the novel and gained renown as a poet his imaginative prose works benefited, retroactively, from the association and began to take on broader dimensions. In effect there was a symbiosis, for his first published volume of verse, entitled Wessex Poems and other Verses, (1898) also benefited, by association, from the microcosmic Wessex universe of his fiction. By the late 1890s "Wessex" was imprinted on the public imagination as an exemplary pastoral icon: the arrival, in the bookstores, of Wessex Poems, would have presented a familiar face, at first sight--undoubtedly a felicitous presentation given the psychological advantages of recognition, albeit momentary, for Wessex Poems would broaden the horizons of Wessex rather than remain within its established boundaries.
Simultaneously, with their passage through translation into foreign languages, the novels began to encompass a wider conceptual sphere. A prime example is to be found in the translation of Jude into German. This gave occasion for one German reviewer to describe Sue Bridehead as "the first delineation in fiction of the woman who was coming into notice in her thousands every year--the woman of the feminist movement--... the intellectualized, emancipated bundle of nerves that modern conditions were producing." In actual fact this quotation, ostensibly the words of the German reviewer, is taken from Hardy's 1912 Preface to Jude. Whatever the reviewer had conveyed, Hardy paraphrased her words. Ironically, then, this appellation, "a woman of the feminist movement," derives from the author's "translation" of the reviewer's reader-response to the text in translation. "Ironic" because, since there can be no exact correspondence between the source text and its flowering in a foreign language, Hardy has come around to describing his own creation via sources several times removed from the original. The question now arises (to which I posit no answer given my lack of fluency in German), was it the cross-cultural journey which opened up the way to this definition or is Sue Bridehead, in her original form, a "woman of the feminist movement"?
Interestingly, Hardy comments, in another context, concerning the translation of Jude:
Letters about "Jude" continue to flow in.... A young German lady whom I know also writes this week--with, of course, a foreigner's complete unconsciousness of any impropriety in the book: indeed the only people who faint & blush over it are fast men at clubs, so far as I see. (Letters, 2:100)
Aside from this rather agile snipe at the Bishop of Wakefield (who had thrown Jude into the fire) and the fact that there were certainly un-fast women reviewers such as Mrs. Oliphant who castigated Hardy for the impropriety of Jude, it seems possible that the subtleties of embedded figuration, in the source text, may remain untranslatable--as in the morning-after scene following their "first night" where the narrator makes it apparent that Sue is/was (to an English reader), non-orgasmic in her first sexual intimacy with Jude. And what of colloquialisms such as "coarse"? This word, connoting, in common parlance, voluptuousness, earthiness, or just plain sexiness, is used pejoratively by Sue and slightly defensively, guiltily, by Jude. How does "coarse" in this context translate into contemporary German? If as "unrefined" say--the whole sexual dynamic between Sue and Jude, which Mrs. Oliphant regarded as obscene because of the undue attention Sue constantly draws to her body and thereby her sexuality would, of course, remain opaque--in the German version--from first to last.
Moving on from issues of small-scale reader-reception in Europe to the larger domain of literary acclaim in the Far East, the year 2007 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the first and longest-reigning Hardy Society in existence: the Hardy Society of Japan. Echoing the words of the French novelist, Romain Rolland, Hardy once suggested that "ultimately Japan will be the leading country of intellectual light" (Letters, 7:39). Given this sentiment he would surely be gratified had he known Japan would be the "leading country" to launch a Thomas Hardy society. In like vein of sincere admiration--and returning momentarily to acts of translation--he commended Arthur Christopher Benson on his "Ode to Japan": "I could hardly have fancied," Hardy wrote, that "so essentially modern a theme--or rather a view--to be capable of translation into poetry of such beauty." "Particularly fine," continued Hardy, are the lines "the genial...
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