August Wilhelm Schlegel

Born in Hanover in September 1767, Schlegel came of age as German Romanticism was gathering force. Alongside his brother Friedrich, he became a central figure in the Jena circle, where criticism and poetry bled into each other. His Shakespeare translations, begun in the 1790s, did more than render the plays faithfully - they gave Germany a classical dramatist it could claim as its own. Later he moved eastward in focus: he became the first professor of Sanskrit on the Continent and produced a translation of the Bhagavad Gita, bridging Europe and India through philology. He died in May 1845, having spent a lifetime making foreign masterworks feel native.