German poet, translator, critic, and writer (1767–1845)
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He turned Shakespeare into a German institution. August Wilhelm Schlegel's translations didn't just cross a language barrier — they made the plays feel as though they'd been written in German all along, remaking the canon for an entire culture.
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, hav…
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German orientalists, A.W. Schlegel claimed in 1819, were not suited to be missionaries or colonizers: “...
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