Hugo, Translated: The Measures of Modernity in Muhammad Ruáal-Khalidi's Poetics of Comparative Literature

In the Ottoman-Palestinian intellectual Muhammad Ruáal-Khalidi's Tarikh Ilm al-Adab ind al-Ifranj wa-l-Arab, wa-Fiktur Huku (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-Khalidi 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-Khalidi'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.