translation studies. retrospective and prospective views

explicitly order him to kill Claudius, this is what the words imply, this is
what “revenge” means. Hamlet is required to punish death by inflicting
death, to commit a murder, a deed condemned even by the Ghost: “Murder
must foul, as in the best it is.” (I, 5, 27)
The image of death is also to be found on an intertextual level in
Hamlet, in a speech from the play which is inspired by Virgil’s Aeneid. The
speech describes Pyrrhus raging through the streets of Troy to revenge his
father’s death, until he finds and kills the aged and defenceless Priam. This
speech is not totally out of place here, as it creates analogies with Hamlet
and his duty to revenge his father:
Head to foot
Now is the total gules, horridly trick’d
With blood of fathers, mothers, daughters, sons,
Bak’d and impasted with the parching streets,
That lend a tyrannous and a damned light
To their lord’s murder. Roasted in wrath and fire,
And thus o’ersized with coagulate gore,
With eyes like carbuncles, the hellish Pyrrhus
Old grandsire Priam seeks. (II, 2, 450-459)
The image of death is as violent in this scene as in the Ghost’s account
of the murder: Pyrrhus, beyond all control, is covered in blood that is dried
and baked on to him, so that he is “impasted” or encrusted with it (in the
same way in which the poison given by Claudius to the king caused his
skin to become covered with “a vile and loathsome crust”).
Death is present throughout the play, accompanying like a shadow
almost all characters: Hamlet kills Polonius and sends Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern to death; Ophelia commits suicide; Gertrude dies because she
drinks from the poisoned cup. Hamlet speaks about his own death, but he
also talks about Claudius’s death. The latter dies in the end, but only after
Hamlet receives his own death wound. Horatio is right to speak in the
following terms:
Of accidental judgements, casual slaughters,
Of deaths put on by cunning and forc’d cause,
And, in this upshot, purposes mistook
Fall’n on th’ inventors’ heads’. (V, 2, 387-390)
The graveyard scene offers a meditation on death, first of all by the
preparations for Ophelia’s funeral. Ophelia’s death introduces a slightly
different tone, as it is associated with flower imagery, in opposition to the
other cruel deaths (king Hamlet’s, Polonius’s). When she dies, she is
surrounded by “crowflowers, nettles, daisies and long purples…” (IV, 7,
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