CHW wrote:Perhaps I wasn’t making myself plain enough. Hamlet’s sea of
troubles include:The possibility that his father has
been murdered by his uncle Claudius;The usurpation of the throne
(perhaps his by right) by Claudius;His replacement, as he sees it, in
his mother’s affections by that same Claudius;His desire for revenge, and how it
is to be accomplished;His sense of frustration in his
dealings with Ophelia: has she rejected his advances?;The fact that members of the Court
are spying on him, testing him, humouring him;His sense of political
impotence;His inability
to resolve these matters by taking action...
Jansy quotes
VN ( 1963 Introduction) to Bend Sinister: Ember,
for instance, in Chapter Seven, gives his friend a sample of the three first
lines of Hamlet's soliloquy ( Act III, Scene I) translated into the vernacular (
with pseudo-scholarly interpretation of the first phrase taken to refer to the
contemplated killing of Claudius, i.e, 'is the murder to be or not to be?'). He
follows this up with a Russian version of part of the Queen's speech...( also
not without a built-in scholium) and a splendid Russian rendering of the prose
passage in...
Perhaps our discussions on the issue
of translation, interpretation, meaning in VN could include passages
from his different novels?