No translation can equal the original in all respects. Usually one is lucky if about three-quarters of the richness of a foreign masterpiece is communicated; only in very rare cases – such as Tieck's translations of Shakespeare into German and FitzGerald's rendering of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayam into English – does the translation become a work of art in its own right. But the odds against this happening are so long that a translator is forced to draw up a list of priorities before he starts work and to decide which particular aspects of the text in question he will strive to render most faithfully. In other words, he must make up his mind what particular function his translation will serve: the man who is providing an A-level ‘crib’ will then aim first and foremost at literal accuracy, the man who is concerned to render the niceties of philosophy may well put subtlety of definition before elegance of style – and so on. If I am to lay my own cards on the table, I confess that my primary aim in translating the plays of Goethe and Schiller has been to bring out their stageworthiness and the dramatic force of their language. I have done this for two main reasons: firstly, because it seemed to me that many existing translations of both poets obscured their theatrical qualities altogether, and secondly, because I am convinced that these theatrical qualities (conveyed in such things as speech rhythms, rhyme-schemes, use of rhetoric, use of assonance, etc.) are vital keys to the playwright's meaning.