The article analyses the style of James Joyce’s interior monologue in ULYSSES and shows the degree of difficulty faced by translators, connected with the blending of third person narrative and free indirect speech exploiting features of colloquial spoken language in a written text. The resultant inexplicitness due to associative gaps and sparse punctuation affects interpretation of the text, as revealed in some problems identified in Maciej Słomczyński’s translation of ULYSSES into Polish. Due to morphosyntactic, lexical, and orthographic contrasts between the language of the original text, English, and the language of the translation, Polish, many nuanced meanings of the original text are ironed out in translation.