 For Schlegel, a good translation is not necessarily a literal translation; the translator must be able to translate the spirit of the text. He must follow the letter, but he must also be able to “capture some of the innumerable, indescribable marvels that do not reside in the letter, but float above it like a breath of spirit!” (SW: VII, 39). Thus, in an 1838 letter to Herrn Reimen, Schlegel explains that the aim of a translator should be to “provide those who have no access to the original with as pure and uninterrupted appreciation of the work as possible” (SW: VII, 287). Anticipating Humboldt’s distinction between the ‘foreign’ (das Fremde) and ‘strangeness’ (die Fremdheit)—which he introduced in the preface of his translation of the Agamemnon from 1816 –, Schlegel also emphasizes that all translations should avoid converting foreign texts into strange texts (Berman 1992a: 154). As he had said in his Works of Homer by Voss, in order to translate a text from a different culture, the translator needs to maintain the text’s naturalness; s/he cannot convert it into something strange, there is no necessity in violating the language, in inventing a new language (SW: VII, 116). Indeed, what Schlegel reproached in Voss’s translation of Homer was precisely “to have created a much too ‘strange’ pidgin of Greek and German” (Berman 1992a: 154). On the other hand, though, as a translator and art-critic Schlegel was also concerned with enabling the assimilation and comprehension of otherness, and criticized strongly the way in which - especially French translations - tended to paraphrase passages from foreign texts in order to make them seem more French (KS: I, 75–76, cf. Berman 1992a: 36). Moreover, Schlegel believed that German culture and language (as opposed to other languages) provided much better conditions for good translations, i.e., translations that were able to assimilate a certain foreignization, without becoming too ‘strange’.