Once Upon a Rewriting: Translating Feminist Fairy Tales in Jeanette Winterson’s Sexing the Cherry

Traditional fairy tales are a subject to feminist discussions because of their gender-based narratives. With a view to removing gendered norms from these narratives, numerous feminist rewriting efforts have been carried out. This is exemplified by Jeanette Winterson’s novel Sexing the Cherry, which includes a chapter titled “The Story of the Twelve Dancing Princesses” retelling the tale by the Brothers Grimm in feminist terms. This rewriting is of significance concerning mainstreaming gender equality through the translation of fairy tales. Based on this perspective, the Turkish translation of this rewritten fairy tale by Pınar Kür is taken as the case study for this research. From the analysis of translation, it has been detected that the concepts of ‘marriage’, ‘heteronormativity’, and ‘revenge narratives’ are the themes in which the translation interventions are most prominent. Accordingly, each theme has been determined as a category to classify the examples to be examined from a feminist perspective. Within this framework, the translation criticism within the study has concluded that the translation, compared to the source text, foregrounds gender equality and feminist ideas to a greater extent, thereby highlighting the importance of the translation as a feminist interlingual rewriting.