“To Be, or Not to Be” in Translation: Ay, There’s the Point

In this contribution, the sentence type (declarative or interrogative), the disjunctor or, the infinitive mode of the verb to be as well as the lexical meaning encoded in it are addressed with regard to some translations of the move that opens Hamlet’s soliloquy, in the Third Act of the tragedy named after him. In the description, the translated passage is quoted and a retranslation into English is proposed, so that the choice made by the translator is better understood. As is evident, this choice is partly related to the architecture of the language into which the text is translated, and partly motivated by the translator’s own interpretation. Moreover, certain features of the language structure deserve to be considered in order to ask whether and how a language system influences the interpretation itself. The legacy of Coseriu’s insights invites us to rethink the activity of translation as a form of knowledge that can access a truly interlinguistic level (übereinzelsprachliche Ebene).