A cognitive poetic analysis of LIFE and DEATH in English and Ukrainian : a multiple-parallel-text approach to Hamlets soliloquy

The article zeroes in on the discrepancy between the verbalization of life and death in Hamlet's soliloquy 'To be or not to be' in the English version and three Ukrainian ones. The Multiple-Parallel-Text-based analysis shows that the conceptual metaphors living is existing, dying is not existing, death is sleep, death is a country, death is a journey and life is a burden reconstructed from the original have been largely left intact in the translations. However, we find that the actual verbalization and conceptualization in the two languages are highly culture-specific and that the versions exhibit great inter- and intra-language variations.