Translating Pasternak’s Hamlet
Translating Pasternak’s Hamlet

Summary/Abstract: Emerson writes in “Self-Reliance” that “a man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within”, and that “in every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty”. Emerson might have been thinking of Montaigne’s essay “Of Experience”, and he might also have been thinking of Hamlet, the play of Shakespeare’s that seems particularly shaped by Shakespeare’s reading of Montaigne. “I would rather be an authority on myself than on Cicero”, Montaigne writes. “In the experience I have of myself I find enough to make me wise, if I am a good scholar.”

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