The Windy Moors of Đà Lạt
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Out on the wily, windy moors of Đà Lạt, the writer Nhất Linh blew his clarinet, melodies ringing through the dark manor. Nearby, on a dimly lit desk, sat a thick manuscript: his Vietnamese translation of Wuthering Heights. Nhất Linh was deeply fond of Wuthering Heights. It was the only book he would ever translate, and he once called it a ‘sublime work of art that will stand the test of time’. As the winds howled on, the translator found himself in a world of fratricidal violence akin to Emily Brontë’s novel; it was these conditions that would drive him to suicide and send his unfinished work adrift across the world.
The year was 1956. Nhất Linh, born Nguyễn Tường Tam, had moved to Đà Lạt, a secluded French-built resort town in the foggy Central Highlands. There was a clear anti-political motive for his isolation. Nhất Linh was an eminent figure in the Vietnamese Nationalist Party, having worked closely with the Việt Minh communists. He even served as Foreign Minister in their coalition government and negotiated with France in Đà Lạt itself before the communist takeover forced him to flee to China in late 1946. There, uniting fellow exiles to seek a third way beyond colonialism and communism, he asked former emperor Bảo Đại to lead negotiations with France, intending to topple him later to establish democracy. When this plan also fell through, his group splintered. Nhất Linh returned to Vietnam and laid low while his allies were being hunted by both the Việt Minh and the French.
After the 1954 Geneva Accords carved out South Vietnam as a haven for anticommunists, he moved to Đà Lạt and settled in a stone manor deep in the pine woods. Family photos from the time showed him smiling widely amid nature, far from the madding crowd. He would go on hikes in search of orchids, then string up a hammock to rest and play his clarinet. As his son Nguyễn Tường Thiết recounted, it was here that Nhất Linh picked up writing again, breezing through two new novels while agonising over Wuthering Heights.
Nhất Linh was no stranger to literary craft. In the 1930s, he had led the Tự Lực văn đoàn (Self-Reliant Literary Group), whose widely-circulated novels and journals lambasted their own Confucian mores as backward and unequal, while championing individual rights, women’s emancipation and nationalism. Nhất Linh’s masterpiece from that time was Đoạn tuyệt (Severance); the novel follows Loan, a Westernised woman who must forgo her ideals to enter an arranged marriage, only to lose her child to her in-laws’ quack medicine and, in a fight with her abusive husband, accidentally kill him too. Throughout his early prose, there is a clear engagement with what the West brought over. Đoạn tuyệt, for example, explores gender on the cusp of modernity: when Loan is put on trial, her lawyer scathingly criticises how society has failed her by letting her access Western education without reforming itself to suit her new wants and needs.
Many Vietnamese translators believed that a text should be brought as close as possible to their freshly Westernised audience.
This engagement with Western influence also courses through his Wuthering Heights translation, which he began in 1952. Initially, the project was titled Mỏm Gió Hú; ‘gió hú’ means ‘howling wind’, echoing the 1925 French translation Les Hauts de Hurle-vent, which he consulted. But ‘mỏm’ is a bold choice: the word evokes a striking rocky protrusion, either horizontal like a promontory, or vertical like a steep crag poking through the clouds à la El Capitan in Yosemite. Over time, he must have outgrown this idea; in the manuscript found by his son Thiết, the word ‘mỏm’ was pencilled out, and written above it in black ink was the more conventional ‘đỉnh’ (top/summit).
Elsewhere in the manuscript, we see Nhất Linh striving to transpose Brontë’s text to his world. Mr. Lockwood and Heathcliff are now Lộc and Hy, their names phonetically mimicked in monosyllabic Vietnamese. Catherine Earnshaw becomes Yên Liên: the Yên for Earnshaw is put first, the Liên for Catherine second, following a Vietnamese name order. After Catherine marries Edgar Linton (Tôn Kha), she does not become Tôn Liên, as Vietnamese women keep their surname after marriage. This requires extra strategies down the line. In Chapter 14, for example, when Nelly prevents Heathcliff from seeing Catherine, saying ‘Catherine Linton is … different now from your old friend Catherine Earnshaw’, the translator rephrased it as: ‘mợ Liên bây giờ khác hẳn cô Liên bạn cậu ngày xưa’ (today’s Aunt Liên is different from your old friend Miss Liên). The ‘cô’ honorific, which suggests girlhood, is contrasted with ‘mợ’, commonly used for more mature women with family.
Some cultural connotations were also mimicked. In the original, Heathcliff is called ‘gipsy’, a racial slur rooted in the centuries-long persecution of the Romani people with connotations of deceit, vagrancy and social deviance. Adapted to Vietnam, where there is neither Romani presence nor knowledge of their discrimination, this epithet varies into ‘giang hồ’, ‘vô loại’, ‘thằng chết đường’ and ‘cầu bơ cầu bất’ – words that evoke a type of vagabond without home or family whom one may find sleeping under a bridge in Saigon and whom Vietnamese society derides.
But why did Nhất Linh go to such lengths to domesticate Wuthering Heights? The answer is twofold. First, he shared the mindset of many Vietnamese translators at the time that a text should be brought as close as possible to their freshly Westernised audience. This mindset would dominate well into the 1970s with the likes of Đỗ Khánh Hoan and Hoàng Hải Thuỷ, the latter of whom rendered Jane Eyre as Kiều Giang and went on to finish his own Đỉnh Gió Hú version. Today, the practice is frowned upon: rendering names so aberrantly is deemed unfaithful because it is hard to look things up online after reading. Still, there is beauty in taking artistic license to set the original in a new linguistic world; the translator’s role feels more salient, and the question of their choices invites active engagement from the reader.
Second, there is evidence to suggest that Nhất Linh connected deeply with Wuthering Heights. As we know, it was his only translation project, and while he was not its first translator (Hoàng Chu Ngạc’s Trên cao gió lộng was already published in 1952), he was its most vocal supporter. In his book Viết và đọc tiểu thuyết (Writing and Reading Novels), he put Wuthering Heights beside War and Peace and Gone with the Wind as examples of ‘great books of the world’; if one read these novels, he said, they would find them ‘not at all inscrutable, but instead very intimate’. In another section on how to create depth in a novel, he noted Wuthering Heights as a ‘strange book’ framed via Nelly’s outsider perspective, yet ‘with only a mundane narrative voice and details, that old nurse has shown us all the depths of the souls of those in the story’.
But most strikingly, Nhất Linh seemed to live Wuthering Heights while translating it. In his memoir, Nguyễn Tường Thiết described how his father would stay up all night, strong winds slapping pine branches against his window, and he would translate under a dim lamp. Staying by his father through those stormy nights, Thiết grew scared of the house. He and his sister Thoa, the only other tenant there, felt that the house was haunted. While this could be a retrospective embellishment, it must also be noted that Đà Lạt is an eerie town itself. Its misty forests and looming manors are rife with tales of hauntings, from lovers who linger at their suicide spots to long-haired women in white who were raped by colonial troops. By isolating himself in this cursed landscape, Nhất Linh was almost embracing a Wuthering life of his own.
In 1958, Nhất Linh finally descended the highlands to Saigon, where he tried to recapture his heyday. He established a publisher to reprint the works of the Tự Lực văn đoàn while running a new literary journal. That journal, however, fell flat. Although Nhất Linh still garnered the utmost respect from the literary community, he had become something of an old guard, and the Saigon scene had sired younger writers who were far more fashionable and kept up with the times. The same could be said about politics: from the 1940s until now, he had been revered among politicians and activists alike, but after his isolation in Đà Lạt, he became nothing more than a figurehead with little power.
His son found him slumped in his chair, a half-empty wine bottle and a wide-open copy of Wuthering Heights on his desk.
A brief stint, a sudden respite from retirement, would seal his fate. On the 11 November 1960, two colonels in the Army of the Republic of Vietnam launched a coup against President Ngô Đình Diệm, accusing him of autocracy and calling for democratic reforms. As ill-prepared troops flocked to besiege the Independence Palace, Nhất Linh authored a leaflet under his real name Nguyễn Tường Tam to drum up support for them. But within a day, Diệm’s loyalist forces had suppressed the coup, and its supporters either fled to Cambodia or were detained, some even tortured. Amid such chaos, nobody came for Nhất Linh. Despite concerns for his safety, he was left alone and could resume his literary enterprises as if nothing had happened.
It was almost three years later, in 1963, that the pincers of authoritarianism suddenly tightened. By then, South Vietnam was in crisis: Buddhists were rallying against Diệm’s persecution, only to face brutal repression with temples raided and hundreds of protestors killed. On the 5 July, Diệm’s government reversed course, charging Nhất Linh with national security violations and summoning him to court by 6 p.m. the following day. Despite the order, he stayed home, and wrote a short note, saying: ‘Let history judge my life. I will accept nobody as judge.’ He criticised Diệm’s regime for potentially letting the country fall into the hands of the communists, and announced his decision to ‘kill myself … to warn those who trample on all forms of freedom’. Then, under the heavy mantle of night, he took a lethal dose of Veronal. His son Thiết found him slumped in his chair, a half-empty wine bottle on his desk. By the bottle lay a wide-open copy of Wuthering Heights – not his translation, but the original. The family rushed him to the hospital in the pouring rain, and he was pronounced dead on the 7 July.
With the help of his friends, Nhất Linh’s translation was completed and published in 1974. The following year, South Vietnam fell, and the books of the lost republic scattered to the winds just like their writers. In the 2000s, when Nguyễn Tường Thiết, now residing in Seattle, failed to trace down a copy of the 1974 edition, he decided to refinish his father’s work himself. Stationed at a Starbucks in the Green Lake area, he typed up the manuscript on his laptop, sometimes swirled into flashbacks of those eerie nights in the Đà Lạt manor. He would find his father’s handwritten edits and marginalia, and questions would beleaguer him: Where was Nhất Linh when he translated this? What was on his mind?
Nhất Linh’s bond with Wuthering Heights is unique in the history of the novel’s reception, and it has perplexed readers to this day. The critic Thuỵ Khuê, in her afterword to Thiết’s memoir, theorised that Nhất Linh had sought the book in his final moments to ‘dig into secret speculations on life and death that he had yet to decipher’. But what of his decade-long project, his devotion to the only book he would ever translate? Perhaps there was indeed something in Brontë’s exploration of humanity that grasped him so much. Perhaps he also saw a likeness of what was happening around him: endless divisions and cycles of violence, where one side was propped up as the opposite of an oppressive other, only to show itself just as capable of oppression as that sworn enemy. Regardless, Nhất Linh somewhat resembles a Byronic hero: a proud, brooding figure who stands alone and fervently fights for his beliefs. Like Heathcliff, he gradually lost his power over the youth, but unlike Heathcliff, who withered away in bitter melancholy, Nhất Linh came out of his isolation to take a stand one last time and died a defiant martyr against dictatorial power.
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Nguyễn Bình is a writer from Hanoi. Bình is the translator of The Tale of Kiều: A New Cry of Heart-Rending Pain (Major Books, 2025) and Treasury of Vietnamese Folk Tales: Volume 1 (Major Books, 2026). Their work has been published in Literary Hub, Puerto del Sol, The Common, Tia Sáng, Văn nghệ Quân đội, among others. Bình is seeking publication for their debut English novel, Diệu and the Green Drum. Beyond literature, Bình is a PhD student in Astronomy at the University of Washington, specialized in massive quiescent galaxies in the early Universe.
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