In 1912, the Ottoman-Palestinian intellectual Muhammad Ruhi al-Khalidi published a signed second edition of _Tarikh 'Ilm al-Adab 'ind al-Ifrinj wa-l-'Arab_ (History of the Discipline of Literature Among the Franks and the Arabs), first serialized in 1902-1903 and published as an unsigned monograph in 1904. This early Arabic foray into modern comparative literature prefigures Erich Auerbach's _Mimesis_ (1946) in framing comparison itself as the work of migration and estrangement. Exiled in Istanbul, Auerbach would lament his need to render a comparison of Western literatures from a memory supposedly unaided by European libraries--yet concede that he might never have undertaken such a study at home. Al-Khalidi's expatriation in Bordeaux, "far from the Oriental libraries where the necessary documents are located," similarly fetters yet inspires his efforts to reconstruct an intertwined history of French and Arabic literatures. Tracing al-Khalidi's translational theories of literary language to his peregrinations (1890s-1908) between provincial centers and imperial capitals (Jerusalem to Istanbul, where he met Ottoman translators of French literature; Istanbul to Paris, where he revisited the Qur'an, Arabic literature, and Arab-Islamic history under French Orientalist tutelage; Paris to Bordeaux, where he served as consul-general of the Ottoman Empire), I read _'Ilm al-Adab_ as testimony both to the translational comparatism of the nineteenth-century Arab literary "renaissance" and to the estrangement that such a consciousness induces in literary Arabic itself. Insofar as al-Khalidi premises a properly "civilized" modern literature on clear language--on what he calls "the exact correspondence of signifier [_lafz_] to signified [_ma'na_] in every dimension"--he denounces both the rhyme and the polysemy characteristic of postclassical Arabic prose and calls on Arabic to approximate the languages of modern Europe (French) and of a Eurasia fast modernizing along "Western" lines (Ottoman Turkish). In so doing he alienates modern Arabic language and literature from the sonic and semantic play--and interplay--of their past. Al-Khalidi, I argue, suggests that Arabic cannot be "modern" without becoming comparable--that is, without submitting its conventions to French and Ottoman arbiters of linguistic modernity.