The Impact of the New Translation of <i>The Second Sex</i>: Rediscovering Beauvoir

The first translation of The Second Sex in English came out in 1952, only three years after its publication in French. We need to think about how remarkable that is: that someone would read the book in the French, recognize its importance, convince a publisher that a translation was needed, and actually take on this overwhelming task of translating the book is quite remarkable. By contrast it took thirteen years for Being and Nothingness, sometimes referred to as the Bible of existentialism, to be translated and published in English. Unfortunately, the quality of the translation work on these two major books was not to be compared: Being and Nothingness was translated by Hazel Barnes, a trained philosopher, while The Second Sex was translated by zoologist Howard M. Parshley.As Margaret A. Simons and others after her have shown, problems abounded with the translation of The Second Sex: deletions (amounting to more than 10 percent), mistakes, a lack of philosophical understanding, and thereby mistranslations of key philosophical terms.1 Parshley is candid in his “Translator's Note”: “Mlle de Beauvoir's book is, after all, on woman, not on philosophy; the reader who is indifferent to existentialism or even in opposition to it will nevertheless gain pleasure and profit in plenty.”2 He tells us that he has conceived of his work as translator to “adhere faithfully to what [Beauvoir] says and to maintain to the best of [his] ability the atmosphere she creates.” He also explains that at the request of the publisher, he has done a few things including doing “some cutting and condensation here and there with a view to brevity.”3While these intentions may not have been evil in themselves—although Margaret A. Simons has claimed that Parshley's decisions were fueled by his sexism—the impact of these editorial and translating decisions was tremendous. First, this book on woman, or more precisely, this seminal feminist work, has been considered with a suspicious mind by feminists because of some of its apparent inconsistencies. Feminists have accused Beauvoir of being masculinist, essentialist, heterosexist, and racist. Reading the original French leaves one to wonder how such accusations could be made. The translation is probably at fault for that, but not entirely. In fact French feminists have also made the same accusations, indicating a certain kind of careless reading on their part or even the absence of any reading at all.4 Another problem due to the translation is that the treatise has not been considered to be a philosophical one. I think that it is fair to say that the old translation made it impossible to understand Beauvoir as the phenomenologist she is. It was made hard enough for the reader to see that she was a genuine philosopher, even though references to existentialism were kept. Parshley's mistranslation of a phrase such as réalité humaine, Corbin's translation for Heidegger's Dasein, using a variety of synonym words and phrases rather than sticking to “human reality” obscured the philosophical and phenomenological grounding of the work. This is one striking example, perhaps the most striking, among many others that Simons and others have noted in their work on the weaknesses of the old translation. A new translation was badly needed. Calls were made for this to happen, and it did.The new translation was published in 2009 in the United Kingdom and was made available one year later in the United States. By now, readers have had the time to reacquaint themselves with the work and have had the time to assess the new translation. The one important thing about it is that it is the first complete translation. Nothing has been left out of this one. This means that readers familiar with the previous translation have discovered entire and sometimes lengthy passages that they did not know about. If a new edition of the work in English had done just that, it would already be a good thing. But the translators have also aimed at fixing the problems of Parshley's translation. In their “Translators' Note,” Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier indicate that they have “translated Le deuxième sexe as it was written, unabridged and unsimplified, maintaining Beauvoir's philosophical language.”5 They also say that they “were keenly aware of the need to put the philosopher back into her text. To transpose her philosophical style and voice into English was the most crucial task we faced.”6 In order to do this, and lacking the philosophical training themselves, they secured the collaboration of a good number of Beauvoir scholars to look at their translation and offer advice, suggestions, and corrections. As they explain, they sometimes received contradictory advice and had to make decisions, entirely their own.In Le Nouvel observateur of April 26, 2010, the title of an article claims that “it is Beauvoir that is being murdered” (“C'est Beauvoir qu'on assassine”).7 The article is about the reception of the new translation and the polemic that ensued Toril Moi's damning review in the London Review of Books.8 What I find interesting is that the article implies that the turmoil caused by Moi's review is actually impacting negatively the reception of the book itself and therefore of Beauvoir's philosophy. Indeed, the author reports on Moi's critique and the problems she has identified but then adds that the new translation, as flawed as it is, does not deserve to be demolished in the way it is by Moi.9Another review that might not be so well known as that of Moi was written by Kristin Rodier and Emily Anne Parker and published in the spring 2012 issue of Symposium. In it, Rodier and Parker lament the fact that the translation was not done by Beauvoir scholars. They say: “In trying to remain faithful to the logic of her prose, we fear that the translators have lost sight of themselves as interpreters and of their responsibility to Beauvoir's philosophy, beyond The Second Sex.”10 In their review, Rodier and Parker bring forth a few convincing examples showing that a literal translation may obscure the meaning, and they point out that in some cases the Parshley translation fared better than the new one while not being preoccupied with literalness.11 They conclude by saying that the new translation is not the scholarly edition that Beauvoir scholars were awaiting. However, it seems to me that they are too demanding when they express the wish for a new scholarly annotated translation of the work that would reflect Beauvoir scholarship as well as feminist, psychoanalytic, anthropological research since the publication of The Second Sex. Indeed, it seems that a translation that would import all of these into the work would run the risk of altering the text in a way that would make it say things that Beauvoir could not have been saying at the time she was writing it. The one example that immediately comes to mind is that of the use of “gender.” While The Second Sex certainly served as a ground to elaborate gender theory, it would be a mistake to attribute that vocabulary to Beauvoir. I also think that a scholarly translation of The Second Sex might run the risk of embracing a particular kind of interpretation and that those scholars who would not share that interpretation might dislike it precisely for that reason. Such a translation would do what Rodier and Parker are asking for, that is, embrace its philosophical role of interpreting the text as it translates it, but it would still be open to criticism, perhaps even more so than a translation that aims at literalness.12An example of that is the choice of translating the opening sentence of volume 2 à la Parshley or à la Borde and Malovany-Chevallier. Parshley translates “On ne naît pas femme: on le devient” as “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.” Borde and Malovany-Chevallier translate it as “One is not born, but rather becomes, woman.” Yet, in an earlier part of the book, they translate a sentence with the same structure differently. Beauvoir says, “On ne naît pas génie: on le devient”: Parshley translates it as “One is not born a genius: one becomes a genius”; while Borde and Malovany-Chevallier translate it as “One is not born, but becomes, a genius.” Parshley translates slightly differently from one sentence to the other but is consistent in his use of the indefinite article a: one becomes “a woman,” one becomes “a genius.” But Borde and Malovany-Chevallier are inconsistent: One becomes “woman,” and one becomes “a genius.” The presence or lack of an indefinite article might seem trivial, but it is far from being so here. It seems to me that the translators have made an interpretive choice here, and it is one that I would criticize myself. They have decided to render the sentence literally.Grammatically, the pronoun le refers to femme. Since the sentence reads “On ne naît pas femme,” it is to the general notion of woman that le refers and not to one particular woman. The sentence would have had to read “On ne naît pas une femme: on le devient” for Parshley's translation to be accurate. And yet, one may ask whether a literal translation is more accurate than an interpretive one. I would claim that aside from the awkwardness of the sentence “On ne naît pas une femme: on le devient,” this sentence announces, in the nutshell of its punchy statement, what will be demonstrated and argued in the whole of volume 2. One is born a singular individual, and one is, through one's upbringing, education, and socialization, made into an instance of the ideal of “woman.” One is not born woman, one becomes one, one is made into a woman. The difference is significant. There was a pretty heated debate about this at the Simone de Beauvoir Society meeting in Eugene, Oregon, in 2011. The amount of discussion that ensued from pointing out this difference (and the continued discussion later that day and on the following days) is an indication that translating even such a simple sentence is loaded with problems, grammatical and interpretative.The new translation is complete, and it fixes a lot of the problems identified in the Parshley translation. It is still flawed and not perfect.13 But translating is no piece of cake, as anyone with a little bit of experience can attest. It is true that translating involves decision making that goes well beyond the merely grammatical and syntaxic. The translator must make decisions with every sentence on where to stand on a spectrum that goes from literality (faithfulness to the original) at the one end to paraphrasing to render the proper meaning (interpretive gesture) at the other. When one is lucky, being faithful to the original will render the meaning. Simple sentences may do that (although with the example I gave earlier we can see that this is not necessarily a given). I have done some translating myself recently. The piece I was translating with my co-editor was an article in German. The style was convoluted, and German grammatical structure is very different from that of English. In some cases it was simply impossible to render one German sentence as one English sentence. Decisions had to be made, and these were hard. But it was possible to make them because we both had philosophical training. The article was on Nietzsche and Husserl, and my co-editor and I are conversant in both. Still, it was not easy to translate, because one cannot merely translate, one must interpret and make philosophical decisions. I think that is the main limitation of the new translation by Borde and Malovany-Chevallier: When push came to shove, when they were receiving contradictory advice from the experts, they made decisions because they had to, but they were not equipped to make them. However, and this is the point I was making earlier, even someone equipped to make those calls might have made decisions that would appear questionable to other scholars holding different interpretations. Then what? One must read the original!But there are problems with the original French too! In an edited volume celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of The Second Sex, Ingrid Galster invited Beauvoir scholars to examine each chapter of the book and compare the published version with the manuscript version kept at the Bibliothèque Nationale as well as with excerpts published in Les Temps modernes.14 Each scholar was to discuss the chapter he or she was responsible for and provide any editorial notes needed in view of preparing the ground for a Pléïade edition of Le Deuxième sexe.15 As Galster notes, the task was not easy: the manuscript was written quickly and in a handwriting difficult to read. The person typing Beauvoir's manuscripts had to guess sometimes, and mistakes crept in. Beauvoir was not a careful reviewer of proofs (something Sartre would tease her about) and let some mistakes through to the final print copies. Galster's contributors have noted many mistakes and discrepancies from the original manuscript to the printed volume. As Galster suggests, there is an urgent need for a scholarly edition of the book in French, and a Pléïade edition would allow for the variants and mistakes to be pointed out.16Knowing all this, we have to ask the question: What is The Second Sex? Is it an idea in Beauvoir's mind? Is it the French original? If so, which is it? Is it the handwritten manuscript or the published edition? After all, as authors we all know that once we return proofs with our corrections we have approved of the text that will be published from these proofs. Or is The Second Sex what has appeared in the many different translations, good or bad? Are there as many versions of The Second Sex as there are renditions of it? That is to say, to my question “What is The Second Sex?” ought one to answer: “All of the above”?While I was preparing the manuscript of an edited volume on existentialist ethics,17 a reviewer criticized the fact that one contributor to the volume was analyzing Sartre's ethics focusing on the work Existentialism Is a Humanism. The reviewer thought that this was wrong since the booklet is really the script of Sartre's public talk at Le Club Maintenant and essentially a summary (and a poor one at that) of what he had exposed in greater detail in Being and Nothingness. The reviewer thought that the author ought to have referenced other books by Sartre. My answer to this criticism was the following: the Sartre most people know is the author of Existentialism Is a Humanism and not the Sartre of Being and Nothingness, Notebooks for an Ethics, or the Critique of Dialectical Reason. If the Sartre reception amounts to the reception of Existentialism Is a Humanism, then one ought to focus one's analysis on that text. Sartre's ethics is what people make it by reading this short text.If we adopt this line of argument, it would then follow that Beauvoir's philosophy is what people make it by receiving the Beauvoir they do. Beauvoir's philosophy (in French) is what you can make it out of the Gallimard edition.18 In English, Beauvoir's philosophy was what you could make it out of the Parshley translation up to 2009. Now Beauvoir's philosophy is what you can make it out of the new translation. Arguably, these could all be different since no translation is a perfect translation. And taking into account what Galster has pointed to, it could very well be that none, translations or original, would correspond to Beauvoir's philosophy as she was conceiving it in her mind and then on paper.This reminds me of the history of the publication of The Will to Power by Nietzsche. With Giorgio Colli, Mazzino Montinari was the editor of the Historish–Kritische edition of Nietzsche's works in German. All translations of Nietzsche are now based upon their edition. In 1998, Montinari published a book titled “La Volonté de puissance” n'existe pas (The Will to Power does not exist).19 In it, he explained that The Will to Power does not exist as a work by Nietzsche even though it does exist historically and in many different forms (five different with different of been published by the of the The point that Montinari while the editorial history of the work is that the fact that of these was “a work by they were received as and the and of Nietzsche's philosophy were based on the reception of these I think that this is a very important we take these and them to the of Beauvoir's The Second Sex? We would be with different of her philosophy based on different of her work. But the important question is Beauvoir In one of the with Beauvoir is about Parshley's and the of which have the among other of the whole philosophical of the the and that in the translation and then would very for translation of The Second Sex to be one that is more more complete and more But does she push the other I have explained that Beauvoir us a philosophy of the The from his or her By the an important role that of a Beauvoir the notion of The the to a reader what becomes a and the and it to the and readers are through the piece of writing that them. The writing that and reader a that to the The reader of it his or her By doing so, the reader or to the The of writing is an and The Second Sex is an instance of this on the part of the on a or the reader must to The work is an to its readers to make the one in which may as the they And in many it seems that the and to work. As it, Second Sex many to and think their Le explains that The Second Sex one to the to look at the with a of for the of an It simply to some and to from the of the Reading to each that she was not a Beauvoir received of from readers to her how The Second Sex their the book had their to them. It was through its This may very well be Beauvoir “All and it is perhaps of all my books the one which has me the most If one me how I it I to for work to its reader through an of a a to a reader and thereby to that The of is by the French original or a translation. The text that but what is it that the The text that or the of the and the to and things on the part of the The text that as is not so different from the original as to its The Second Sex, translated badly or what Beauvoir was The a flawed is our with the quality of the translation merely a Is it merely a for are We the works of the authors we We our the where they have where they where they are the in in I in in of a that the philosopher had and with on his I with at a with a on it a of Nietzsche I did not know it I wish I could have to the what an the de a few years I in at the where Beauvoir and with the same I did my and Sartre and Beauvoir's But as as we our authors as as we ought to be As the works we must and we have a to take these works and use them as a for our and for our many did not of as a was to our I saying that the and in which we her work do not They do I not for or careless translation work. But what I find most important is for the work to exist in such a and that it can to The Parshley translation for some to the The new translation, as flawed as it is, has the by the work on the so to It the reader with a complete edition of the work for the first That is really It mistakes that have the philosophical and phenomenological import of the work. That is also very The new translation, even though it may not be the one we were for, is an with the publication of the Beauvoir since by the of is a to Beauvoir's are to what Beauvoir had to offer and are to to it The is this we must be for the new translation of The Second Sex as well as for the translations of many other and that were not in English up to As we need to criticize the new translation and point to its As we need to to push for a scholarly annotated edition of the work in French and then in English. as we must on and think with and beyond Beauvoir. The is there in need of Beauvoir is to us to see that and to We need to and not let be by what the Nouvel observateur has a debate about the translation, as this would only to Beauvoir and her

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