Person · poet & dramatist · Germany
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The central figure of German letters, who read Kalidasa's Shakuntala in 1791 in Georg Forster's German rendering of William Jones's English, and wrote a four-line epigram about it that became the most quoted European response to Indian literature.
- Date
- 1749–1832
- Function
- Text & inscription
- Confidence
- Not assessed
Worth knowing
He then took the Sanskrit prastavana — a prologue in which the director and the poet discuss the play about to be performed — and used it to open Faust. The debt is structural and he acknowledged it.
Connections (2)
- TransmissionKalidasa
Goethe read Kalidasa's Shakuntala in 1791 in Georg Forster's German version of William Jones's English translation, and wrote four lines about it that became the most quoted European response to Indian literature. He then took the Sanskrit prastavana — the prologue in which a director and a poet discuss the play about to begin — and used it to open Faust. It is the clearest structural debt any major European work owes to Indian drama, and he said so.
- Life routeWeimar
Weimar under Karl August was a court town of a few thousand people that held Goethe, Schiller and Herder at once, and it is where the German encounter with Sanskrit literature began in earnest — Herder and Goethe reading Jones's translations in the 1790s, a generation before Schlegel and Bopp turned the interest into a discipline. What Germany made of India afterwards ran in several directions, not all of them creditable, and this is where it starts.
Sources
Wikipedia, “Johann Wolfgang von Goethe”. Goethe, Werke (Weimarer Ausgabe); Georg Forster’s Sakontala (1791); Dorothy Figueira, Translating the Orient.
Open Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in the repository →