Measure for Measure: From the Prosody to the Prose of the World

In tune with the long-nineteenth-century Arab intellectual nahḍa (“revival”), Tārīkh is a project of epistemic and temporal as well as literary translation.Footnote ¹⁰ At play is the Arabic word tarjama, in senses modern (“translation”) and premodern (alongside “translation,” “interpretation” and “biography”). Hence the Victor Hugo of al-Khālidī's title: Hugo's biography (tarjama) is an interpretation or translation (tarjama) of the Science of Literature among the Europeans and the Arabs. For like other nahḍa thinkers, notably the Egyptian intellectual Rifāʿa Rāfiʿ al-Ṭahṭāwī (1801–73), al-Khālidī strives to equate Arabic and European (especially French) literatures, even as he recognizes the problem of (in)commensurability at the heart of translation and comparison. Where al-Ṭahṭāwī, however, arguably reoriginates Arabic literary history in ancient Greece, al-Khālidī reoriginates French literary history between early Islamic Arabia and Arab-Islamic Andalusia. Indeed, “by placing Arabic poetry at the origin of European poetry,” as Noorani provocatively argues, al-Khālidī challenges Pascale Casanova's thesis in La république mondiale des lettres (The World Republic of Letters) (252). “For Casanova,” Noorani writes, “the French break from Latin inaugurated the world republic of letters with France at the centre. Al-Khalidi makes Arabic poetry and its prosodic forms the actual origin of this break with Latin” (257).

A paradox arises: it is by recalibrating prosody, al-Khālidī hints, that the world turned prosaic. After the Arab-Islamic conquest of Spain, Arabic poetry broke the measures of Latin and sparked fission and fusion in the Romance dialects, at once estranging them from Latin and infiltrating them with Arabic. Arabic poetry thus entered Europe as a vernacularizing force, making ordinary languages—the Romance dialects—literary languages in their own right. Al-Khālidī reads Hugo's nineteenth-century poetics through this history. Thanks to Hugo's childhood years in Spain, he says,

As a mother tongue—via Andalusia—of Europe and its modern literatures, imperial Arabic turned Dantean vernacular: in Dante's words, the language “infants acquire . . . by imitating [their] nurses” (3).Footnote ¹¹ Indirectly, Hugo and nineteenth-century French Romanticism imbibed “nature”—as art—from Arabic literature. And through modern European empires, al-Khālidī intimates, history comes full circle—summoning European literatures to vernacularize Arabic, to recall it from artifice to “nature.”

Indeed, while al-Khālidī concedes the centrality of drama (and the novel) to Hugo's oeuvre, he sees it as largely foreign to Arabic. Thus, he turns to lyric poetry, which Arabic and European literatures ostensibly “share,” to find the common measure that will propel Arabic's (re)turn to prosaic transparency—though to translate “lyric” into Arabic, he must coin the neologism “ الشعر الموسيقي ” (al-shiʿr al-mūsīqī; literally “musical poetry”), whose very novelty whispers, sotto voce, that its chime might be broken. This pivot punctuates al-Khālidī's translation of a key passage from Hugo's 1827 preface to Cromwell, foundational to French Romanticism:

Compare Hugo:

For Hugo, drama stages a Christian form of “le réel” (“the real”), at once ethereal and carnal (xxiv–xxv). His insistence that verse, no less than prose, can capture this “real” appears in a discussion of Molière (xlv). Abridging that discussion, al-Khālidī accents Hugo's urging that drama be written in verse. In so doing he is able not only to assimilate drama (a genre Hugo names as the apotheosis of Western literary modernity) to a “musical poetry” that links Arabic and European literatures, but also to argue that verse—rooted in Arabic's influence on Europe—is the bedrock of that modernity. His rendition evokes Karen Emmerich's redefinition of translation as “translingual editing” (2): not a transfer but an interpretation of meaning, just as the “original” it interprets is also both editing (interpreting prior texts, producing new variants) and edited (the work of many hands) (3–5, 15–17, 192–93). The translation nips and tucks Hugo's “original,” interleaving commentary and allusions to Arab-Islamic intertexts. While it appears “one with the original” in “interlinear” form—to invoke Walter Benjamin's “Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers” (“The Task of the Translator”; 82)—its unity is a deceptive straight face. Marshaling the multivalent concept of measure to negotiate the force-field between Arabic and French, the passage is what Lydia H. Liu calls a “super-sign” (Clash 13): “a hetero-linguistic and hetero-cultural movement of the signifying chain” (14) that “crisscrosses the semantic fields of two or more languages simultaneously and makes an impact on the meaning of recognizable verbal units” (13), silently rewriting one as “the destiny and destination” of the other (37). Against ahistorical theories of translation as “transfer,” Liu's super-sign recharges translation—and comparison—with the polarity of power. Which way, then, does the super-sign of al-Khālidī's translation point? Is Arabic reaffirmed as origin so that French might be its destination?

Al-Khālidī's translation responds—in riddles. Where Hugo fleetingly likens text to a “vêtement” (“garment”) and verse to the “ceinture” (“belt”) that delineates its folds, al-Khālidī expands the metaphor into a leitmotif. From Hugo's intimation that meaning—thanks to verse—cuts a svelte figure, al-Khālidī conjures the image of a verse that hugs meaning with “European dress.” On its face, his insistence, after Hugo, on the virtual inseparability of word from meaning chimes with Benjamin's conception of the language-content relation in an “original,” before one crosses the threshold into translation. “While content and language form a certain unity in the original, like a fruit and its skin,” writes Benjamin, “the language of the translation envelops its content like a royal robe with ample folds” (75).Footnote ¹³ In al-Khālidī's ideal literary Arabic, as in Hugo's ideal literary French, meanings must wear tight-fitting words, akin to the skin of Benjamin's fruit. Yet al-Khālidī's word as “European dress” is not equivalent to Hugo's unmarked garment. Hugo's image shades seamlessly into the words and worlds his readers know, and beyond; indeed, it universalizes. Al-Khālidī's, by contrast, bursts at its seams with foreignness; it particularizes. Nor is al-Khālidī's image equivalent to Benjamin's skin of a fruit. The latter is a simile drawn from nature; the former, one that points to artifice, fashion cut to measure by human or machine. The word al-Khālidī calls a “transparent mold for meaning,” then, is not so transparent: from its pretense to “nature,” artifice slides out. Thus, its foreignness is redoubled: nature turns alien (European) and artful or artificial (tailored dress). Indeed, al-Khālidī's translation charges the word-meaning relation whose desirability he argues with a decidedly European current. Arabic no longer wears pasha pants, billowing with polysemy. European dress cinches such “old, worn garments,” imparting measured “proportionate folds” to language and grooming it for modernity. Interestingly, then, al-Khālidī's properly modern Arabic word folds the French of “translation” into its Arabic “original.” This translational Arabic wears no “royal robe with ample folds.” In this super-sign, French goes native, clinging to Arabic's skin—indeed, cutting its figure.

Al-Khālidī's similes, however, also invite Arab-Islamic referents into French. Elaborating Hugo's image of verse-distilled meaning as an “elixir,” al-Khālidī adds a nod to the history of alchemy absent from the French, hinting at the Arabic origin of the term elixir (al-iksīr) itself. As elixir turns into wine, al-Khālidī's translation takes a striking turn. Implying that verse might be as “transparent” a medium as prose for “la nature et le vrai” (“nature and truth”), Hugo poses a rhetorical question: “Le vin . . . cesse-t-il d’être du vin pour être en bouteille?” (“Does wine . . . cease to be wine for being bottled?”). Answering it, al-Khālidī puts the Qurʾān in Hugo's mouth: “No! It becomes an exquisite aged wine whose parting note is musk, to which the aspirants aspire.” This rejoinder adapts Qurʾānic verses describing the dwellers of Paradise:

Significantly, these verses appear in the chapter “ المطففين ” (“al-Muṭaffifīn”), which M. A. S. Abdel Haleem translates as “Those Who Give Short Measure” (413). The chapter's opening verses read,

Tacitly, the Qurʾānic wine al-Khālidī transposes to Hugo's poetic meaning—the better to imagine Arabic drinking from the same clear vessel—is promised to those who give just measure: materially, giving the equivalent of what they receive in exchange; morally, giving others the justice to which they believe themselves entitled. Al-Khālidī thus links the equation of word and meaning within one language—and across languages—to Qurʾānic commands to social and political justice. This move redeems not just French but all poetry in Qurʾānic eyes, limning a poetic word that means (and does) what it says.

Al-Khālidī's conflation of the raḥīq (“wine”) of poetic meaning in Hugo's preface with the raḥīq of Paradise in the Qurʾān makes Arabic—and Islam—the measure of French literature, sacralizing Hugo's French wine. It makes Hugo's poetics speak a Qurʾānic Arabic. As super-sign, al-Khālidī's translation arguably points now to Arabic, sliding Arabic under the skin of French. Yet it also nearly controverts Qurʾānic inimitability by restaging Hugo's precepts as imitations of Qurʾānic writ. Al-Khālidī's off-key quotation (Emmerich would say editing) of the Qurʾān—adding the adjective muʿattaq (“aged”) to raḥīq ships the wine of Qurʾānic Paradise to the cellars of Bordeaux—desacralizes the Qurʾānic text and sacralizes Hugo's, conflating, too, the clashing materiality of a wine Christianity permits but Islam proscribes with the chiming metaphoricity of the wines of meaning (in Hugo) and paradise (in the Qurʾān). Does the polarity of power in the super-sign, then, still point to French? To which eloquence are al-Khālidī's readers to aspire: Hugo's “wine” or the Qurʾān's? Are both now “equal,” trailing the same scent?

In al-Khālidī's pursuit of political equality through intralingual or translingual equivalence lurks what Emmerich and Venuti dub a communicative or instrumentalist model of translation, where translation is “a (failed) transfer of an invariant meaning via the construction of textual equivalents” (Emmerich 1n2) or “an invariant form, meaning, or effect” that is “contained in or caused by the source text” (Venuti 1). Both al-Khālidī's instrumentalism and the countervision of language implied by the hermeneutic model of translation Venuti espouses—where translation, as “an interpretive act that varies the source text” (8), mediates the source text's form, meaning, and effect in relations of “variable equivalence” (ix)—enjoy a long history in Arab-Islamic thought. Rebecca Gould has argued that medieval Arab-Islamic theories of literary language double as tacit theories of translation. Comparing the ninth-century polymath al-Jāḥiẓ (ca. 776–868/9) and the eleventh-century literary theorist ʿAbd al-Qāhir al-Jurjānī (d. 1078 or 1081), Gould notes that while al-Jāḥiẓ posited “a singular relation between word and meaning”—such that a word in one language might be declared superior to its counterparts in that language or in another tongue, hence untranslatable—al-Jurjānī decoupled word and meaning from static relation (90; see 87–92).Footnote ¹⁴ Turning from words as such to the ways words mean, al-Jurjānī accents naẓm: the precise relation—arrangement, articulation—between words and meanings (Gould 95). Gould calls that relation “dialectical” (95), implying its contingency. In naẓm, she explains, al-Jurjānī locates poetic craft. Implicitly, and prefiguring Hugo, words themselves are “equal,” insofar as they bear no intrinsic relationship to their meaning. It is how words are motivated to make meaning, typically within the context of a line, that lends them a provisional singularity. In the limit case of the Qurʾān, that singularity takes the form of inimitability (iʿjāz). Indeed, as Lara Harb argues, al-Jurjānī framed what Harb calls the “poeticity” of language not as transparency—though he decried gratuitous artificiality—but as difficulty: the imaginative-interpretive stretch (takhyīl) it compels its listener or reader to make in order to “translate” figures of speech, to move from obvious to hidden meaning, “‘the meaning of meaning’ (maʿnā al-maʿnā)” (Arabic Poetics 174; see 44–74). In Gould's counterintuitive reading, then, for al-Jurjānī what is inimitable is not untranslatable, but most translatable, precisely because it demands interpretation—as the nearly-the-same-but-not-quite Qurʾānic verses in Hugo's mouth attest (95). Anticipating Benjamin yet eschewing his nostalgia for “pure language,” al-Jurjānī reenvisions translation “as an interpretive technique . . . which, far from overcoming polylingualism, makes it legible” (Gould 94). Pace Venuti, who argues that instrumentalism has dominated “translation theory and commentary for more than two millennia” (1), “fostering an illusionism of immediate access to the source text” (5), Gould reveals an alternative history.

Tārīkh gestures to that history. Curiously, however, while al-Khālidī cites al-Jurjānī, he bends him toward al-Jāḥiẓ and others who valorize the transparent signifier, including the tenth-century theologian and jurist Abū Bakr Muḥammad al-Bāqillānī (d. 1013) and the fourteenth-century polymath Ibn Khaldūn (1332–82). Al-Khālidī's acts of translation may belie what Venuti calls the “illusionism of immediate access” to meanings through words, exposing its fallacy as much within one language as across two or more languages in translation. Yet the metronome of his thought continually swings al-Jurjānī's polysemic naẓm back to al-Jāḥiẓ's invariability. The latter recalls, conceptually, another sense naẓm carries: verse or versification, as opposed to prose. Tārīkh invokes naẓm as verse—the regular measures of prosody—to fix Jurjānīan naẓm, to constrain interpretive possibility in the “transparency” of prose. Taking the measure of measure, al-Khālidī equates poetics East and West:

Notice the stealthy homology—sonic, then semantic—al-Khālidī forges between Arabic and French prosodies. Citing al-Bāqillānī's إعجاز القرآن (Iʿjāz al-Qurʾān; Inimitability of the Qurʾān), al-Khālidī hints that the French mètre (“meter”) might derive, contra French dicta, not from the ancient Greek word métron (“measure”) but from the Arabic matr—or, perhaps, that French and Arabic both derive their terms from Greek. He juxtaposes al-Bāqillānī's words with French parlance and lets his reader divine a comparative conclusion from the sonic convergence of the Arabic matīr, matr, matartu and the French mītr. Yet true to his accent on signified over signifier, al-Khālidī does not rely on morphology alone. He summons meaning, too, to clinch his point, showing his reader how other Arabic words for poetry—qarḍ and qarīḍ, both emphasizing cutting—align with matr, which also means cutting (or stretching to the breaking point). Having created a shared world from the weave of language—where the measures of poetry in French and Arabic, and thus the epistemic ground of comparison, are one—al-Khālidī can argue for a modern Arabic in sync with European languages.

Thus, poetic meter interests al-Khālidī less as such than for the metacritical force of its animating concept: measure.Footnote ¹⁵ After all, language, for him, dies by metrical cuts—by stretchings of “truth.” He aims, instead, to move the prosody of the world toward common measure. Of the Arabs he writes,

Poetry is suspect for its music, for measures too artful to be truthful. Tracing an arc from metrical rhymed poetry to rhymed prose to unrhymed metrical discourse, al-Khālidī reaches his ideal: prose (47).

While prose may assume “ وجه بديع ” (“elegant form”), it “ شبيه بالكلام الذي لا يتعمل ولا يتصنع له ” (“resembles speech that neither goes to great trouble nor puts on artificial airs”; 47). Liberation, for al-Khālidī, stems from the equality of words he hears in Hugo, from a leveling of language to the “natural,” from equation of word with thing, deed, truth:

In critiquing the poetics of the pre-Islamic Arab past that post-Islamic parlance dubs الجاهلية (al-Jāhiliyya; “Age of Ignorance”) and pronouncing the Qurʾān the origin of a truth-telling Arabic, al-Khālidī diverges somewhat from his Syro-Lebanese contemporaries Najīb al-Ḥaddād (1867–99) and Sulaymān al-Bustānī (1856–1925). As Noorani argues, the Jāhiliyya is the center of gravity in both al-Ḥaddād's three-part series of essays (1897) comparing French and Arabic literatures—which also centered Hugo—and al-Bustānī's critical introduction to his translation of Homer's Iliad (1904). Contending that pre-Islamic Arabic poetry in particular rivaled modern French poetry in its “simplicity,” al-Ḥaddad prefigured al-Bustānī's equation of pre-Islamic Arabic and ancient Greek poetics on a similar axis of “naturalness” (see Noorani 241–42; 244). By contrast, I suggest, al-Khālidī stages the Qurʾān not only as a moral corrective to the perceived waywardness of poets and their language, but also as a stylistic corrective to the perils of rhymed or metered language, and an embodiment, avant la lettre, of linguistic and literary modernity:

Ultimately, al-Khālidī damns poetry (and rhymed prose) not just for sacrificing moral truth on the altar of artifice but for spurning the real language of human beings:

In the final translation, then, the language of the Qurʾān—for al-Khālidī, the language of God—again draws close to the language of “civilized” (read “European”) men.

Synching “Nature”: Antiquity as Modernity

Beyond prosody, wordplay is the bane of the “natural” language that would reconcile Arabic literature with its modern counterparts. Lambasting Arab literati for highbrow imitation—in his wry words, adding an eighth ode to the seven Suspended Odes (al-Muʿallaqāt al-sabʿ) of pre-Islamic Arabia or a sequel to the rhymed-prose fictions (maqāmāt) of the tenth- to eleventh-century masters al-Hamadhānī and al-Ḥarīrī—al-Khālidī urges them to make meaning instead (35). This critique of artificial writing catalyzes a call for literary comparison as cure. As al-Khālidī writes,

The more precisely languages mean, the higher their literatures on the “ سلم الحضارة ” (“ladder of civilization”; 32). And the precise word is the most “natural”:

This literary regime ties meaning to two faces of nature: outer (the empirical world) and inner (the felt world). To make meaning, says al-Khālidī, is

Al-Khālidī articulates the mutism of modern Arabic speakers as a crisis of translation: Arabic's inadequacy to the (earthly) world, modernity's terrain. He glosses their problematic sensibility by half quoting a saying (ḥadīth) of the Prophet Muḥammad: “ والدنيا سجن المؤمن ” (“The (earthly) world [dunyā] is the prison of the believer”; qtd. in al-Khālidī, Tārīkh 35). Omitting its punch line, “ وَجَنَّةُ الْكٰافِرِ ” (“and the paradise of the nonbeliever”; qtd. in al-Qushayrī 210), which critiques worldliness, al-Khālidī bends the ḥadīth's meaning to his message. Might the believer, he hints, need to see prison as paradise?

To synchronize the ideology and practice of modern literary Arabic with those of “civilized nations,” al-Khālidī reaches to the primeval: to the Arabic of Muḍar, one of two major constellations of tribes in ancient North Arabia. Tradition held that the Prophet Muḥammad, who hailed from the tribe of Quraysh, descended from Muḍar (see Kister), and Ibn Khaldūn describes the language of Muḍar as the Arabic in which the Qurʾān was revealed (al-Muqaddima 253–54, 259 and Muqaddimah 346, 353). Thus, the language of Muḍar represents an Arabic that at once belongs to recorded “history”—through the Qurʾān and pre-Islamic poetry—and predates it. Al-Khālidī's stratagem uncannily recalls the position of the nineteenth-century French Orientalist Ernest Renan (1823–92). In his Histoire générale et système comparé des langues sémitiques (General History and Comparative System of the Semitic Languages), first published in 1855, Renan argues that Semitic languages were once analytic (simple) but became synthetic (complex). Restored to the analytic mode that their ancient forms purportedly share with contemporary Indo-European languages, Semitic languages would be kin with the “modern” (Renan 427–28). Intent on submitting Arabic letters to the epistemic dominion of a European world order that equates vernacularity with reason, Renan insists that Arabic's deepest antiquity holds the key to its potential modernity. He enlists no less a native informant than Ibn Khaldūn. Writes Renan:

Like Renan, al-Khālidī maintains that language must be analytic to be modern—and comparable. He too asks, How do we restore written Arabic from morbid complexity to healthy simplicity—return a synthetic language that uses (too) many morphemes to express an idea to an analytic language that assigns one morpheme to one idea? And like Renan, al-Khālidī argues that the first Arabs possessed the linguistic clarity that Europeans now evince—that antiquity was modern. Indeed, he introduces the problem of literary comparison in Tārīkh by pondering the relationship of the language of Muḍar (lughat Muḍar) to the language of sedentary urban life and settled civilizations (lughat al-ḥaḍar). For al-Khālidī, if the “pure” ancient Arabic of Muḍar once bound word to meaning, the complex Arabic of ḥaḍar has severed that bond. Positing lughat Muḍar as the quintessential Arabic—thus recalling Renan's construction, from Ibn Khaldūn, of “the pure idiom of Muḍar” as the grammatically simplified yet “correct” language that contemporary Arabic must resurrect—al-Khālidī makes it the measure of Arabic's past and potential modernity. This modernity takes Arab antiquity and European(ized) actuality as its touchstones. If fuṣḥā, like the “pure idiom of Muḍar,” once interposed an airtight seal between word and meaning, the “corruption” of erudition has since torn that seal open. Modern Arabic can revert to an ancient Arabic that “donn[e] à chaque idée et à chaque relation son expression isolée” (“grant[s] to each idea and to each relation its isolated expression”), to borrow Renan's words (422), only through the vernacular: here defined, counterintuitively, as a standard written Arabic gutted from within, stripped of “useless” flourishes to a realist plainspokenness.

Ibn Khaldūn's imprint on al-Khālidī's ideology of language is profound. In his المقدمة (al-Muqaddima; Prolegomena) of 1377, Ibn Khaldūn premised both sound science (ʿilm; that is, knowledge writ large) and good poetry on the tight correlation of word to idea.Footnote ¹⁷ He writes,

If such is true of oral discourse, how much truer, he argues, of the written word, where the further “حجاب آخر بين الخط ورسومه في الكتاب وبين الألفاظ المقولة في الخيال ” (“veil . . . that separates handwriting and the form of letters (found) in writing from the spoken words (found) in the imagination”; 234; 316–17) must be lifted for ideas to shine and readers to grasp “ مباحثها فقط ” (“the problems inherent in the (ideas)”; 234; 317). Ibn Khaldūn transposes this demand for transparency from science to poetry:

In Ibn Khaldūn, al-Khālidī hears modernity untimed: the fourteenth-century thinker's accent on immediacy—“translation” as transfer—announces Hugo. So too do seventh-century speakers of the Arabic in which the Qurʾān was revealed. Clarity and uncontrived eloquence, al-Khālidī writes, once were second nature—habit—for the Arabs; devoid of artifice, the figurative language of Muḍar prefigures الكلام البديع ” لفيكتور هوكو “ (“the elegant tropes of Victor Hugo”; Tārīkh 34).Footnote ¹⁹ Then artificiality strangled Arabic until its poetry barely registered authentic emotion, unlike “ الروايات المضحكة او الفاجعة ” (“the comedies or tragedies”) of Greek, Roman, or European (ifranj) writers,

A return to ancient Arabic would usher in comparability with the world's modern (Western or Westernizing) literatures and their roots in (Western) antiquity—and forge a literature whose fundamental “nature” would be the great equalizer, appealing (if differently) to elites and masses alike.

Enter Victor Hugo: The Égalité of Words

Victor Hugo thus embodies a resurrection of the “lost” simplicity of Arabic letters and a suppression of large swaths of the Arab-Islamic past in the name of a modernity in which Arabic and French literatures must converge to compare. In a chapter aptly titled “ نظم فيكتور هوكو ” (“Naẓm Fīktūr Hūkū”; “The Poetry [Naẓm] of Victor Hugo”), al-Khālidī's Tārīkh further transacts complex equivalences between Arabic and French meter and meaning. Keen to prove the virtuosity that non-Arabic poetry demands—thereby claiming, for Hugo, a genius reserved for Arabic—al-Khālidī defines the dominant French meter, the alexandrine, then observes:

Even Hugo's trespass of the conventional alexandrine proves the “rule” of French-Arabic comparability:

The French alexandrine, al-Khālidī suggests, echoes Arabic poetics in demanding the metrical and semantic self-sufficiency of each verse line, barring enjambment. Thus, Hugo's transgression underscores the comparability of (classical) French and Arabic prosodies. And in Hugo's “excess” lies a modernity to which the measure of Arabic poetry, now out of sync, must be reset. First, however, al-Khālidī must further domesticate the alexandrine. He likens the singular alexandrine baḥr (“meter”) to the plural Arabic buḥūr (“meters”), equating the alexandrine with the sum of Arabic meters, sixteen in all. Compare Sulaymān al-Bustānī. Likening the alexandrine to the rajaz, the simplest Arabic meter, al-Bustānī writes,

Al-Bustānī intimates the simplicity of both a single meter and the metrical system it exemplifies. While he later notes that stress complements syllable in Western prosody, he ascribes no difficulty to the alexandrine as such. By contrast, al-Khālidī harmonizes French and Arabic metrics on the common chord of difficulty. No matter that he posits a nonequivalent equation between one meter and many, not unlike the unequal halves of Hugo's transgressive alexandrine. The point is to make Arabic and French comparable so that Arabic can accept Hugo's excess.

So far complexity—exemplified by the alexandrine—has grounded French-Arabic comparability. Now al-Khālidī shifts the ground of comparability to other meters, beyond the alexandrine, in which Hugo composed poetry: forms distinguished by their simplicity, which he describes as closer to those of the formal Arabic strophic songs (muwashshaḥāt) and colloquial Arabic strophic songs (azjāl) of Andalusia—that “translation zone,” beloved to nahḍa intellectuals, between the medieval Arab-Islamic world and modern Europe, between the erstwhile imperial supremacy of the former and the present imperial supremacy of the latter.Footnote ²⁰ Simplicity, not difficulty, becomes the measure of literary virtuosity, as well as of comparability:

Hugo's departure from the alexandrine to simpler meters—seeded in Andalusia—heralds Romanticism's democratizing revisions of poetic word, sense, and sensibility. Writes al-Khālidī:

This pronouncement translates Hugo's preface to Odes et poésies diverses (1822; Various Odes and Poems): “la Poésie n'est pas dans la forme des idées, mais dans les idées elles-mêmes. La Poésie, c'est tout ce qu'il y a d'intime dans tout” (“Poetry is not in the form of ideas but in the ideas themselves. Poetry is all that is innermost [intime] in everything”; Hugo, Preface [Odes] ii). Rendering intime (“innermost”) as bāṭinī (“hidden”), al-Khālidī invokes the concept of al-bāṭin—the Qurʾān's hidden meaning—to suggest a poetry that “voir dans les choses plus que les choses” (“see[s] more than things in things”; Hugo, Preface [Odes] ii). A poetry that lifts the veil of words from ideas decrypts and demystifies empirical “existence.”

Al-Khālidī thus frames metrical simplicity and its semiotic corollary—the turn to words that convey meaning simply—as translations in broken time. In a metrical view of literary history, medieval Europe translated new schemas of rhyme and prosody—through the troubadours—from Arab sources. In a semiotic view, the modern Arabic-speaking world, mired in literary artificiality, must back-translate the rhetorical “naturalness” the Qurʾān enshrines from a modern European literature Hugo exemplifies. What distinguish medieval European translation of the Arabic “science of rhymes” and the desired back-translation by early-twentieth-century Arabs of modern European literary epistemologies, in other words, are uneven temporalities. While medieval Europeans supposedly knew nothing of what they translated from their Arab counterparts, modern Arabs once did know—but forgot—what they now are called to translate from their European counterparts. Al-Khālidī grants the Arabic-speaking world a past knowingness denied to Europe, but grants Europe a present knowingness that the Arabic-speaking world has lost and must retrieve: in part from its past, in part from a European-defined present. This logic yokes Arab one-upmanship over Europe—the Arabs have always already been (at least partially) modern—to Arab subordination to Europe: Arabic-language writers must catch up to and project a literary modernity that Europe now defines and lives.

Ultimately Hugo incarnates that modernity—namely, the idea that a properly “modern” literary language makes meaning universally legible, hence democratic:

This passage is arresting, not least for the French republicanism al-Khālidī detects in Hugo's literary ethos: “he declared that all words are equal.” Al-Khālidī identifies at the heart of modern literature a new aesthetics of nondiscrimination, whose radical republic of words rattles distinctions between “literary” and “common” language. The two are now eminently translatable. Yet not interchangeable, for the message that “Victor Hugo” imparts to Arabic-language writers is clear: if a plebeian word will do, the everyday is preferable to the recherché. Thus, the common accrues a shade of valorized difference in the new global regime of modern literature, a (political) edge that makes it more than equal to the rarefied word it replaces. With one caveat: such an “exchange,” al-Khālidī stresses, should not violate grammar or morphology. That caveat holds open space for an emergent (vernacularized) modern standard Arabic in which formal and colloquial registers converge but do not interconvert: the medium of the demi-lettrés (“semiliterates”).Footnote ²³ Assimilating Hugo's modernity into the long-historical continuum of Arab-Islamic theory, al-Khālidī cites al-Jurjānī's أسرار البلاغة (Asrār al-Balāgha; Secrets of Eloquence) to this effect:

Thus summoned to prove the eloquence of the ordinary, al-Jurjānī chimes with Hugo: all words are equal. Yet, al-Jurjānī hints, in literary language some words are more equal than others.

“Licit Magic”: Translating “Grenade”

What of Hugo's words? Of the poems in his Les Orientales, al-Khālidī translates only “Grenade” (“Granada”), fruit of Hugo's eyewitness to Spain, for only “ القسم المتعلق بالاندلس واسبانيا ” (“the section [of the volume] related to Andalusia and Spain”) fulfills the Romantic dictate that writing issue “ عن رؤية وانفعال نفسي ” (“from vision and a [passionate] stirring of the soul”; 201). Arab-Islamic Spain thus mediates the supposed immediacy of Hugo's “nature.” Indeed, in the gardens of Andalusia, al-Khālidī declares,

Through al-Khālidī's sleight of hand, Arab-Islamic Spain seeds a European literary modernity shading from Romantic to realist technoscience. For the neo-Eden of Andalusia's gardens makes of Hugo a neo-Adam poised to rename the world “aright,” precisely by translating his mind into an instrument of exact empirical observation, measure, and capture. From this transmedial apparatus unspool figures of speech (badīʿ) that are less metaphoric conjurations (Jurjānīan takhyīl) than they are mechanical reproductions: audiovisual recordings of the real. Andalusia is thus prime mover of the machinery of Hugo's modern poiesis, which translates signifier (sound image), signified, and referent into equivalence. In this old-new naẓm of lafẓ and maʿnā, words (re)turn transparent: one with ideas—and now flush with knowable life.

Even as al-Khālidī writes Arabic into European literary history, however, he writes Hugo into the annals of Arabic literature. Pronouncing “Grenade” “ السحر الحلال ” (“licit magic”; 201)—long an Arabic metaphor for poetic power (Abu Deeb 368; Pomerantz 208)—he inducts Hugo among the Arab greats. Yet in “licit magic” is a double entendre, calling Arabic to heed Hugo's siren song. After all, al-Khālidī sees only useful poetry as “licit magic” in modernity. He admires Hugo's “Grenade” as ”كتاب في الجغرافية أفرغ في قالب شعري “ (“a book on geography poured into a poetic mold”; 201–02)—poetry harnessed to science. Moreover, although al-Khālidī translates “ هذه القصيدة لتعلم اساليب الشعر الافرنجي ” (“this ode [qaṣīda] so that you [the reader] know the stylistic conventions of French [ifranjī] poetry”; 202), his translation renders Hugo's French in Arabic prose. The magic of “Grenade” now dwells not in forms but in ideas.

Listen, nonetheless, to these closing lines from al-Khālidī's translation. Surely new resonances sing from its Arabic words (and form):

When al-Khālidī renders Hugo's “L'Alhambra! l'Alhambra!” (“Grenade” 292) with ”الحمراء وما ادراك ما الحمراء“ (“The Alhambra! What can make you know what the Alhambra is?”), he echoes a distinctly Qurʾānic interrogative style, of which these verses from “سورة القارعة ” (“Sūrat al-Qāriʿa”; “The Striking Hour”) are but one example: ”ٱلۡقَارِعَةُ / مَا ٱلۡقَارِعَةُ / وَمَآ أَدۡرَىٰكَ مَا ٱلۡقَارِعَةُ “ (“The Striking Hour. / What is the Striking Hour? / What can make you know what the Striking Hour is?”; al-Qurʾān 101.1–3).Footnote ²⁶ Al-Khālidī's Qurʾānic style slyly expels Hugo's Catholicism and returns the Alhambra—and by extension Granada—to Islam, centuries after the Castilian reconquest of 1492. Echoing the apocalyptic tenor of the Day of Judgment in “Sūrat al-Qāriʿa,” his translation breaks Hugo's chimes, making Granada's untolled fortress bells ring with the return of the Arab-Islamic repressed—and its tolled cathedral bells go silent, “bell towers” tacitly primed for the Islamic call to prayer. Witness his strategic revisions to Hugo's poetico-political “geography.” Translating “Dont sous des mains infidèles / Aucun beffroi ne vibra” (“Of which, under infidel hands / No belfry vibrated [with a ringing bell]”; Hugo, “Grenade” 292) as ” وفي جميعها قلاع لم تضرب يد الاعداء فيها بالنواقيس “ (“All contain fortresses whose bells no enemy hand has rung”; al-Khālidī, Tārīkh 203), al-Khālidī refuses Hugo's “infidels” (infidèles)—intending Muslims—and substitutes the religiously neutral “enemies” (aʿdāʾ). And to his translation of “Toutes sur leurs cathédrales / Ont des clochers en spirales” (“All, on their cathedrals, have spiral bell towers”; Hugo, “Grenade” 292) as “ وفي جميعها كنائس جامعة لها جرسيات حلزونية الشكل ” (“[A]ll contain cathedrals, with spiral bell towers”; al-Khālidī, Tārīkh 203), he interposes an arch footnote: “ لانها كانت مآذن ” (“Because they were minarets”; 203n2). Hugo's preface to Les Orientales yearned for a poetics of “la mosquée” (“the mosque”; vii). Al-Khālidī fulfills Hugo: he reattaches the very word (and its referent) to the idea.

Still, while al-Khālidī's Arabic prose translation of Hugo's “Grenade” strikes new notes, one wonders if form is as unimportant as Hugo and his translator suggest. In translating verse into prose al-Khālidī makes Hugo's language yet more ordinary, beyond the Frenchman's dream of radical semiotic equality. As the lines “Toutes ces villes d'Espagne / S’épandent dans la campagne” (“All these cities of Spain / Are scattered across the plain”; Hugo, “Grenade” 291) become the prose sentence “ فهذه المدن الاسبانية . . . منتثرة في السهول ” (“These Spanish cities . . . are scattered across the plains”; al-Khālidī, Tārīkh 203), the rhyme Espagne / campagne disappears, and with it “artifice.” Meaning becomes plain. Yet silenced is the music that gives meaning resonance. So too Hugo's wordplay. In ensuing lines the proper noun Grenade flirts with two senses of grenade: the pomegranate (the local fruit that gives the city its name) and the hand bomb that resembles it (bursting—on detonation—into “arils”). Whispering, too, is another French name for the fruit, pomme-grenade (“apple of Granada”), which chimes with paume-grenade (“palm [hand] grenade”): not the actual French word for “hand grenade,” grenade à main, but what a poet's imagination, indulging in wordplay, might call the weapon. When Hugo writes, “Grenade a plus de merveilles / Que n'a de graines vermeilles / Le beau fruit de ses vallons” (“Granada has more marvels than / The beautiful fruit of its vales / Has seeds vermilion”; “Grenade” 292–93), or “Grenade, la bien nommée, / . . . / Cent fois plus terrible éclate / Que la grenade écarlate” (“Granada, the well named, / . . . / One hundred times more terrible bursts / Than the scarlet grenade”; 293), he activates the naẓm of words and meanings that grenade evokes. In Arabic, however, the words for pomegranate (rummān) and grenade (qunbula yadawiyya; literally “hand bomb”) do not chime with the word for Granada (Gharnāṭa). Absent this Jurjānīan dialectical relation (to reprise Gould), al-Khālidī is left with meanings unhinged from the resounding word.

And yet, al-Khālidī's “red bomb” detonates Hugo's “Grenade,” giving Arabic the last laugh. This too is poetry. Indeed, his rendition proves that translation—as an interpretation that, in Venuti's words, “releases an endless semiosis that is delimited by . . . changing, interrelated, and mutually determining contexts” (3)—need not “rob” a text of its savor. If we believe Hugo and al-Khālidī, appeals to sense perception attach to meanings, not forms. Thus, as Emmerich reminds us, they might assume, in translation, transformative new words (3)—and conjure, unbidden, the extraordinary through the ordinary. Witness Hugo:

Words matter less than what they carry. Indeed, Hugo argues that ideas trigger sense perception. Just as wine exceeds bottle in his preface to Cromwell, so too does honey here escape the cell. Effects like scent, color, and flavor are created not by vessels—cell and bottle—but by their contents, honey and wine: that is, not by words but by ideas.

Hugo's cracked vessels fracture his “equivalences” with Ibn Khaldūn. For Ibn Khaldūn holds that ideas are democratic—“ فالمعاني موجودة عند كل أحد ” (“everyone may have ideas”)—but words are not, since literary composition “ المحتاج للصناعة ” (“requires a technique”; al-Muqaddima 290; Muqaddimah 392). Speech, he writes,

Words differ in eloquence, then, as vessels vary “باختلاف جنسها لا باختلاف الماء ” (“according to the material from which they are made, and not according to the water (in them)”; 291; 392). Words matter. Still, like water, “ المعاني واحدة في نفسها ” (“the ideas are one and the same”; 291; 392). How then to reset Ibn Khaldūn to Hugo's measure? Anticipating Nadia Al-Bagdadi's observation that Ibn Khaldūn wishes for literature “the homogeneity of science” (444)—a philosophical consistency in which ideas govern words—al-Khālidī registers Ibn Khaldūn's suspicion of the vessels that bear ideas. He commandeers this passage to argue that Arab literati revel in synonymy at the expense of ideas. However precious their words, their water is unchanging (Tārīkh 69). Thus, al-Khālidī cracks Ibn Khaldūn's vessels to release Hugo's honey and wine: the equality of words, the poetry of ideas.

Inimitability, Translation, Infinity

We risk entrapment, however, in the indifference of words Hugo supposes and the indifference of meanings Ibn Khaldūn proposes. The seal of language is always its undoing. I return to al-Khālidī's translation of Hugo's preface to Cromwell. There, just after he puts the Qurʾān in Hugo's mouth, he intercuts Hugo's assertion—from a prior passage that refers modern poetry to Christian roots—that “tout ce qui est dans la nature est dans l'art” (“all that is in nature is in art”; Hugo, Preface [Cromwell] xxv). Al-Khālidī's translation gives Hugo nearly the last word, smuggling his Euro-Christian poetics of “nature” into Arabic under Islamic cover. Yet in the Qurʾānic verses Hugo has just “spoken,” the echo of makhtūm (“sealed”) and khitām (“end”) vaporizes the very closure that secures “pure wine, sealed” (raḥīqin makhtūmin) into a scent that escapes containment: its “parting note[,] musk” (khitāmuh[u] miskun; al- Khālidī, Tārīkh 164). As Hugo concludes (khatama), his voice turns inconclusive; French wine turns Arab musk. In this Jurjānīan naẓm, the balance of power between “West” and “East” tips.

I have said that al-Khālidī continually bends al-Jurjānī's naẓm, the dialectical relation of words and meanings, back to al-Jāḥiẓ's and Ibn Khaldūn's dream of the transparent signifier. Yet the imaginative power of literary translation—the perpetual flight of meanings from words—defies containment. Worded, meaning is at once closed and open. If Arabic too often is imagined a limit case of comparison—“untranslatable”—I would argue that it preserves some measure of incomparability by infolding the comparable, as al-Khālidī infolds French in Arabic. If, as al-Jurjānī intimates, inimitability permits endless translation, incomparability can issue a laissez-passer to comparability. While that act does not dissolve the pressures of empire, it dislocates the epistemic horizons of language from post-Enlightenment Europe and partially reattaches them to an alternative genealogy in earlier Arab-Islamic thought. Revising the “old” under the world-facing guise of the “new,” al-Khālidī's Tārīkh absorbs French postulates on language and literature yet reroutes them—through Arabic antecedents—to translational conclusions that sound some conceptual “phonemes” in each, and silence others. In these sounds and silences, we hear the measures of modern comparative literature as translations: continuities in death, broken chimes.