August Wilhelm Schlegel

August Wilhelm (after 1812: von) Schlegel (German:

Schlegel was born in

In 1796, soon after his return to Germany, Schlegel settled in Jena, following an invitation from Friedrich Schiller.^[5] That year he married Caroline Schelling, the widow of the physician Böhmer.^[3] She assisted Schlegel in some of his literary productions, and the publication of her correspondence in 1871 established for her a posthumous reputation as a German letter writer. She separated from Schlegel in 1801 and became the wife of the philosopher Schelling soon after.^[5]

In Jena, Schlegel made critical contributions to

It is widely accepted that the Romantic Movement in Germany emerged, on the one hand, as a reaction against the aesthetical ideals defended in Classicism and Neoclassicism, and on the other, as a deviation from the rational principles of the Enlightenment with the consequent regression to the irrational spirit of the Middle Ages.^[6]

Schlegel argues that, from a philosophical point of view, everything participates in an ongoing process of creation, whereas, from an empirical point of view, natural things are conceived as if they were dead, fixed and independent from the whole.^[6]

In 1797 August and Friedrich broke with Friedrich Schiller. With his brother, Schlegel founded the Athenaeum (1798–1800), the organ of the Romantic school, in which he dissected disapprovingly the immensely popular works of the sentimental novelist August Lafontaine.^[7] He also published a volume of poems and carried on a controversy with Kotzebue. At this time the two brothers were remarkable for the vigour and freshness of their ideas and commanded respect as the leaders of the new Romantic criticism. A volume of their joint essays appeared in 1801 under the title Charakteristiken und Kritiken. His play Ion, performed in Weimar in January 1802, was supported by Goethe, but became a failure.

When the work of art appears as if all its elements had been consciously chosen by a power above the artist, it has style; when the artist has not transcended his/her individuality, then s/he is categorized as a mannerist artist (SW III, 309–312).^[6]

In 1801 Schlegel went to Berlin, where he delivered lectures on art and literature; and in the following year he published Ion, a tragedy in

For Schlegel, the magic of a work of art is that it brings us into a different world, with all its own internal coherence, and this is why it needs to become organic and complete unto itself. Therefore, its purpose should not be to reflect the real world with naturalism, but rather to create its own world, which could never be a question of applying a set of rules and principles to a particular matter (paintings, words, marble), such as classicist principles seemed to do.[6]

In 1812, he travelled with De Staël, her

Schlegel was 50 years old and his own master.[10] He was financially independent and could travel at his own expense.^[11] Schlegel's Vienna Lectures had been published and were read across Europe and in Saint Petersburg. Therefore, he could cultivate friendships with the educated elite.^[12] He continued to lecture on art and literature, publishing in 1827 On the Theory and History of the Plastic Arts,^[2] and in 1828 two volumes of critical writings (Kritische Schriften).^[2][3]

Schlegel's translation of William Shakespeare, begun in Jena, was ultimately completed, under the superintendence of Ludwig Tieck, Dorothea Tieck, and Wolf Heinrich Graf von Baudissin. This rendering is considered one of the best poetical translations in German.^[3]

Schlegel did find the time to pursue his fascination for India. He buried his head in Sanskrit.^[13] From 1823 til 1830 he published the journal Indische Bibliothek. In 1823 edited the Bhagavad Gita, with a Latin translation, and in 1829, the Ramayana. This was followed by his 1832 work Reflections on the Study of the Asiatic Languages.^[2][3]

Schlegel became convinced that the origin of Germanic people could be identified in

According to the 1910-1911 Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition:

As an original poet Schlegel is unimportant, but as a poetical translator he has rarely been excelled, and in criticism he put into practice the Romantic principle that a critic's first duty is not to judge from the standpoint of superiority, but to understand and to "characterize" a work of art.^[3]

An article for the 1920 Encyclopedia Americana provided the following thoughts:

As a critic [Schlegel] carried on the tradition of Lessing and Herder. Without possessing Lessing's power of style and personality, [Schlegel] commanded a wider range of artistic susceptibility. His unerring linguistic and historical scholarship and the calm objectivity of his judgment enabled him to carry out, even more successfully than Herder himself, Herder's demand that literary criticism should be based on a sympathetic penetration into the specific individuality of each poetic production rather than on the application of preconceived aesthetic standards.

Schlegel established models for the new method of analytical and interpretative criticism in his essays on

Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. His Vienna lectures On Dramatic Art and Literature were translated into most of the languages of Europe and stand as a permanent contribution to critical literature; his definition of the terms "classic" and "romantic" met with general recognition; his views on the so-called "three unities" and on the "correctness" of Shakespeare evoked an especially strong echo in England and finally made the Johnsonian

attitude toward Shakespeare appear obsolete.

Formal perfection of language is the chief merit of his poems, which suffer from a lack of originality. In his drama Ion, he vainly attempted to rival Goethe's Iphigenie. He prided himself on being "model and master in the art of sonnets" among the Germans. He is at his best in sparkling literature parodies such as Ehrenpforte und Triumphbogen für Kotzebue (1801).^[5]

The 1905

• The Schlegel-Tieck translation is universally considered better than any other rendering of Shakespeare in a foreign language. Thanks to Schlegel and Tieck, Shakespeare has become a national poet of Germany.
• [Schlegel's] Spanisches Theater (1803-09), consisting of five pieces of Calderon's, admirably translated,... [made] that poet a favorite with the German people, and his Blumensträusse der italienischen, spanischen und portugiesischen Poesie (Berlin, 1804), a charming collection of southern lyrics, [marks] the appearance of . . . the naturalization in German verse of the metrical forms of the Romanic races.
• Schlegel was quarrelsome, jealous, and ungenerous in his relations with literary men, and did not even shrink from slander when his spleen was excited.

Honors

• Elected a member of the American Antiquarian Society in 1836.^[16]

Portraits

• Portrait of A. W. Schlegel by Albert Gregorius (1774–1853), 1817, in Coppet Castle (Switzerland)

Published works by Schlegel

• Ion (1803)^[17]
• Rom Elegie (1805)
• Schlegel's Berlin lectures of 1801/1804 reprinted from manuscript notes by Jakob Minor (1884)^[3]
• Poetische Werke (1811)
• Observations sur la langue et la littératures provençale (1818)
• Bhagavad Gita (1823, Latin translation)
• Kritische Schriften (1828, critical works)
• Ramayana (1838, Latin translation, incomplete)
• Sämtliche Werke (1846–1848) (Collected Works) issued in twelve volumes by Eduard Böcking
• Œuvres écrites en français (3 vols., 1846)
• Opuscula Latine scripta (1848)

Translations by Schlegel

Schlegel's Shakespeare translations have been often reprinted. The edition of 1871–72 was revised with Schlegel's manuscripts by Michael Bernays. See Bernays's Zur Entstehungsgeschichte des Schlegelschen Shakespeare (1872); Rudolph Genée, Schlegel und Shakespeare (1903). Schlegel also translated plays by Pedro Calderón de la Barca, such as La banda y flor, which became the basis for E. T. A. Hoffmann's 1807 singspiel Liebe und Eifersucht.

A selection of the writings of both August Wilhelm and Friedrich Schlegel, edited by Oskar Walzel, will be found in Kürschner's Deutsche Nationalliteratur, 143 (1892).

Letters of the Schlegel brothers

• Ludwig Tieck und die Brüder Schlegel. Briefe ed. by Edgar Lohner (München 1972)

Notes

References

• This article incorporates text from a publication now in the
  New International Encyclopedia
  (1st ed.). New York: Dodd, Mead.

Attribution

•  This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Schlegel, August Wilhelm von". Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 24 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. pp. 328–329.
• This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Böhme, Traugott (1920). "Schlegel, August Wilhelm von" . In Rines, George Edwin (ed.). Encyclopedia Americana.

Further reading

• Paulin, R. The Life of August Wilhelm Schlegel, Cosmopolitan of Art and Poetry, Cambridge: Open Book Publishers (2016)
  ISBN 9781909254954
• Rudolf Haym, Romantische Schule (1870; new ed., 1914)
• Franz Muncker (1890), "Schlegel, August Wilhelm", Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (in German), vol. 31, Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, pp. 354–368
• Strauss, D. Fr., Kleine Schriften (1862)
• Huch, Ricarda, ‘Blütezeit der Romantik (1899)
• Caroline, Briefe aus der Frühromantik (ed. by Erich Schmidt, 2 vols., 1913)
• Sidgwick, Mrs. Alfred, Caroline Schlegel and her Friends (1889)
• Bernays, M., Zur Entstehungsgeschichte des Schlegelschen Shakespeare (1872), new ed. Celtis Verlag, Berlin 2013,
  ISBN 978-3-944253-02-2
• Genée, R., A. W. Schlegel und Shakespeare (1903)
• Gundolf, F, Shakespeare und der deutsche Geist (1911)
• Helmholtz, A. A., The Indebtedness of S. T. Coleridge to A. W. Schlegel (1907)
• da Rocha Abreu, Manuel: Zwischenruf - Rassistisch. In: Frankfurter Rundschau, 17 January 2006, P. 26.

External links

Wikisource has the text of the Nuttall Encyclopædia article Schlegel, August Wilhelm von.

Wikimedia Commons has media related to August Wilhelm Schlegel.

• Works by August Wilhelm von Schlegel at Project Gutenberg
• Works by or about August Wilhelm Schlegel at Internet Archive
• Phelan, Anna Augusta von Helmholtz, 1907 "The indebtedness of Samuel Taylor Coleridge to August Wilhelm von Schlegel". Retrieved 2010-09-24.
• Francke, Kuno, Howard, William Guild, Schiller, Friedrich, 1913-1914 "The German classics of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries : masterpieces of German literature translated into English Vol 4". Retrieved 2010-09-24.
• Hay, Katia D. "August Wilhelm von Schlegel". In Zalta, Edward N. (ed.). Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
• Translating Shakespeare Archived 2008-07-04 at the Wayback Machine - process and problems of translating the works of William Shakespeare, done by Schlegel
• Schlegel, August Wilhelm : von (1817). Vorlesungen über dramatische Kunst und literatur. ita. Milano: dalla stamperia di Paolo Emilio Giusti, nella contr. di s. Margherita, al n.o 1118.