Resisting gender roles with discordant retranslations: untaming The Shrew on the Turkish scene

This article examines two Turkish productions of The Taming of the Shrew, namely Hırçın Kız (2018) by the State Theatre of Istanbul staging Nureddin Sevin’s interlingual translation (1946) and Şirreti Evcilleştirmek (2023) by the independent theater Moda Sahnesi staging Emine Ayhan’s more recent translation (2020). Adopting Theo Hermans’s concept of “discordant translation” and Klaus Kaindl’s definition of “intergeneric translation”, it analyses the textual, paratextual, multimodal and contextual elements of both performances and illustrates how agents foregrounded their resistant attitudes toward the source text and its previous interpretations, expressing their social criticism and resisting gender hierarchy. It concludes that both performances “untame” not only the female protagonist but also the widespread take on the play as a romantic comedy, presenting “discordant”, “intergeneric” retranslations that, at least partially, transform bawdy comedy into irony, and moreover into tragedy while problematizing the audience’s perspective.