Best English meaning of "Скончаться. Сном забыться. Уснуть" [closed]

Question

To cut a short story long, I've been trying to learn Russian for some time, and having had little success with the normal courses (I have a memory like a sieve), I thought I'd try to learn by translating and speaking poems. I've chosen Shakespeare's Hamlet Soliloquy (Monolog) in the Pasternak translation, and I'm using the Smoktunovsky and Vysotsky performances for pronunciation. I've discovered that Messrs Google, Babel and co may be fine for a rough translation, but they can fall very short of the mark in translating the actual sense and meaning of Russian. I particularly hate it when they are smart enough to recognize that it's Hamlet but dumb enough to spout the English version (not the original Klingon), which differs significantly from the Pasternak translation (at least, as far as I can make out!).

Anyway, I've managed (I think) to make sense of most of the Pasternak, but there are a few phrases that I just can't find a reasonable interpretation for. The first of these is:

Скончаться. Сном забыться. Уснуть

I've got Уснуть (sleep), but "To fade away, a forgotten dream", as my best guess for Скончаться. Сном забыться, just doesn't seem right.

I'd be grateful if somebody could provide me with an idea of what they actually mean in context.

Answer 1

The original phrase is "To die, to sleep – To sleep – perchance to dream".

Скончаться — this is a formal way to say 'to die'.

Сном забыться — 'to doze off, to lose contact with reality', lit. "to forget oneself in a dream, in sleep".

Уснуть — 'to fall asleep'.

Answer 2

About meanings in the context. The original monologue is about possible suicide (suffering or death), however many of Russian translations incl. the one by Pasternak (especially in its version for Taganka Theatre and Visotsky) intentionally disguise that idea by transforming the famous 'to be or not to be' dilemma into 'struggle or inaction', to glorify the idea of struggle. So most Russian readers are quite sure of the latter main idea. After expression of it in the very beginning of translation, the words "Скончаться. Сном забыться. Уснуть." sound like 3 options of inaction:

to die; to forget yourself in sleep /in a dream/; to fall asleep, 

while in the author's concept they are a part of Hamlet's understanding what death is like: it's like to fall asleep but the problem is you'd most likely have dreams you wouldn't like.

Answer 3

Скончаться is yet another word for to die. It's of the same root as конец, i.e. end.

Забытьё is either a half-sleep, a nap or a fainting, a loss of conciousness. BTW. Sometimes забыться may also mean to lose self-control (literally, to forget oneself), yet in Pasternak's text on both occasions забыться / забыться сном surely is to fall into a doze.