Famous Translations (Illustrated Edition) - Wuthering Heights

Author: Emily Bront?
Publisher:
Publication Date: 1999-01-01
Features: The translator mentioned in an article over a decade ago that Wuthering Heights is a novel written by a pure poet, rather than a novelist like Hardy, who is both a poet and a novelist, or a pure novelist like Dickens. In terms of the basic elements of traditional realistic novels—characters and plot—Wuthering Heights only features the male and female protagonists as prominent, and in reality, it is their emotional characteristics that stand out the most—since human emotions should be the primary element of poetry. The other characters in the novel lack the profound and intense emotional depth of the protagonists, making most of them bland and even unreasonably absurd. For example, Isabella’s love for Heathcliff and Young Catherine’s love for Edgar Linton are both contrived by the author. Only Heathcliff and Catherine are true, natural, and full of charm, standing above the other characters, tightly gripping the readers, leaving no room for criticism or censure.
In terms of structure, as the main love story of the novel progresses to the lovers’ separation, Catherine’s death, and seemingly reaches its climax, Heathcliff continues to suffer emotional torment and takes revenge on the Lintons and the Earnshaws. This should be the downward slope from the climax to the end. When he fasts for five days and four nights and wanders in his dreams, it is a U-turn, and the story is nearing its conclusion. However, it intersperses a large number of love entanglements involving the second generation, and in the end, it even arranges a distant and optimistic happy ending, making what could have been a brilliant conclusion bubble up with trivialities. Here, Emily seems to have stepped away from poetry and fallen into the labyrinth of writing novels. This is precisely proof from the opposite side: Emily was a poet, and poetry, whether in verse or prose, was her forte. Wuthering Heights was indeed a prose poem written by her, and its immense success, striking charm, as well as some of its flaws, all stem from this.