Hugo, Translated: The Measures of Modernity in Muḥammad Rūḥī al-Khālidī's Poetics of Comparative Literature

Abstract

Abstract In the Ottoman-Palestinian intellectual Muḥammad Rūḥī al-Khālidī's Tārīkh ʿIlm al-Adab ʿind al-Ifranj wa-l-ʿArab, wa-Fīktūr Hūkū (1904, 2nd ed. 1912; History of the Science of Literature among the Europeans and the Arabs, and Victor Hugo ), the figure of Victor Hugo marks the uneven chime and dissonance of select notes in Arabic and French literary epistemes and histories. Tracing Hugo's dictum that poetry inheres not in forms but in ideas to Arab-Islamic antiquity, al-Khālidī incarnates in Hugo the lost “nature” to which a fallen, “artificial” Arabic literature must return. In this regime of comparability, words must be cut to the measure of their meaning, and meter—poetic measure—tuned to the “natural” rhythms of speech. With al-Khālidī's translations of meter across time and language, this essay reads his translations of Hugo's theory and poetry (“Grenade”) to argue that the underlying concept of measure encodes a drive to equate the world's literatures and empires.