Wuthering Heights in Translation

Via @laetitia-stloubert.bsky.social we share with you: Wuthering Heights in Translation, a new online exhibition developed in collaboration with third-year English Studies students at the University of Nantes. The exhibition examines the many afterlives of Emily Brontë's novel, tracing its ongoing transformation through translation, adaptation, and rewriting across languages and media.

From the Yorkshire moors to the Philippines, from Japan to Brazil, by way of Turkey, Mexico, and France, students from Nantes Université (FLCE) invite you to discover the many lives of Emily Brontë’s classic novel. Created by third-year students majoring in English as part of their Cultural Translation course with Laëtitia Saint-Loubert,, this online exhibition explores how Wuthering Heights has travelled across languages, cultures, and media.

Through interactive maps and digital timelines, the online exhibition Wuthering Heights in Translation traces the novel’s many journeys through its translations, adaptations, and rewritings across diverse cultural and historical contexts. 

How do you translate the untranslatable? What happens to Gothic aesthetics, gender relations, or the violence of passion as they cross linguistic, cultural, and medial boundaries? From adapt ations for young readers to ballets inspired by the novel, from book covers that reinvent its visual world to costumes that bring its characters to life, from the translation of proper names to epistolary rewritings and imagined accounts of Heathcliff's enigmatic youth, these projects offer a wealth of new ways to rediscover Wuthering Heights. Others explore the novel's silences, ellipses, and unresolved mysteries, inviting visitors to investigate, play, and reflect on the many transformations of this enduring classic. 

Collaborative, creative, and digital, this project showcases the vitality of a novel that, for nearly two centuries, has continued to be translated, adapted, reinvented, and reinterpreted around the world.