Place · ducal literary city · Germany
Weimar
The small German court town where Goethe, Schiller and Herder worked, and where Goethe read Georg Forster's German version of William Jones's translation of Kalidasa's Shakuntala in 1791 and wrote a four-line eulogy that became the most quoted European response to Indian literature.
- Function
- Text & inscription
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 50.980, 11.323
Worth knowing
Goethe took the device of a theatrical prologue between a director and a poet directly from the Sanskrit prastavana and used it to open Faust. It is the clearest structural debt any major European work owes to Indian drama.
Connections (2)
- Life routeJohann Wolfgang von Goethe
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.
- TransmissionOxford
Weimar in 1791 and Oxford in 1832 are the two beginnings of European Indology. Goethe's reading of Shakuntala in German, from Jones's English, from the Sanskrit, made Indian literature a European literary subject; the Boden chair made Sanskrit a British institutional one, endowed explicitly to help convert India. The same texts were being read for opposite reasons in the two cities.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Weimar”. Archaeological Survey of India and State Archaeology monument records, and the standard regional literature.
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