This introduction frames the critical exploration of the writings on tragedy, translation, and twentieth-century literary theory by the late comparatist Thomas J. McCall, who died suddenly in January 2011 after returning from a mountain trekking trip in Nepal. McCall was a highly respected Romanticist and literary theorist whose important early work on Friedrich Hölderlin’s translations of Sophocles ultimately developed into a broader critical speculation concerning the theoretical stakes of Hölderlin’s translations, and his poetics, for German romantic thought and for twentieth-century theory more generally. The three pairs of essays collected in this volume underscore the crucial role of Hölderlin’s notions of translation and poetics in Romantic theory and in contemporary thought, in particular as his ideas have been transmitted through the work of Walter Benjamin. These critical explorations also help us understand the importance of Tom McCall’s work in proposing a radicalized, Hölderlinian theory of tragedy and translation that lingers on in twentieth- and twenty-first-century theoretical writing.