The Arabic Afterlives of S. Yizhar’s Khirbet Khiz’ah: Translating Global Modernist Affect between Empathy and Distress

Abstract

Like Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899), S. Yizhar’s Khirbet Khiz’ah (1949) has been read locally as embodying liberal ideals of empathy. Some Hebrew writers further believed that Yizhar’s text positively inclined Arabic-language readers toward Israel by broadcasting the image of an empathetic Zionist. However, analyzing the novella’s Arabic translations and receptive afterlives suggests a more complex dynamic that partly mirrors Conrad’s pained postcolonial Anglophone reception. Namely, while Palestinian critics within historic Palestine have read empathy tried by circumstance, critics in the wider Arab world have read a historical testament broadcasting not empathy but personal distress. What emerges is a model of translation as transaction between currencies in an affective economy whereby empathy and personal distress refract as they circulate through the myriad epistemological spaces of Edward Said’s crisis of modernism