Okan Bayülgen’s Richard: an intersemiotic translation and appropriation of Shakespeare’s Richard III

Abstract

In intersemiotic translations, we may speak of a “hypertextuality” among different discourses that raise questions regarding “translatability” and foreground the multifaceted transcultural connection between the source texts and target texts, which is affected by the translator’s intercultural competence. Such intercultural competence can be observed in Okan Bayülgen’s Richard, a translation and appropriation of Shakespeare’s Richard III. Presenting and deconstructing ideas on medieval thoughts on the body, current debates on social and personal trauma, racism, ethics, and the function of theatre, Bayülgen does not merely translate Shakespeare’s Richard III into Turkish but translates it to twenty-first-century socio-political topics like the migration crisis and the elusiveness of defining what is evil in today’s post-truth period from a Turkish intellectual point-of-view. Thus, this essay aims to examine intersemiotic translations, the intersections of translation and critical race theory, and narrative equivalence to illustrate how Bayülgen’s Richard as an intersemiotic translation and appropriation recontextualises Shakespeare’s historically and culturally distant Richard III and makes it accessible to twenty-first-century Turkish audiences.