A second Second Sex

 
Anglophone feminists, rejoice! The new English translation of Simone de Beauvoir's masterpiece The Second Sex was published in the UK this week by Jonathan Cape (with the American edition set for publication by Knopf in April 2010).

Viewed by many as feminism's foundational text, Gallimard published The Second Sex in two volumes (to mixed reviews) in 1949.  It sold extremely well (200,000 copies in its first week), and garnered Beauvoir followers in sectors of the French population who might otherwise have avoided the kind of philosophical treatises she was trained to write. The Second Sex broke down barriers, not least those of class and education.

An English translation appeared in the US in 1953, and was a bestseller there, too.  Except that the translation was performed by a zoologist, one H.M. Parshley, who struggled no doubt valiantly but produced quite a sub-par rendering of Beauvoir's idiosyncratic French prose. Also, he cut about 20% of the book, which he felt was irrelevant.

Beauvoir scholars have been saying for years that a new translation was desperately needed,* but it took Sarah Glazer's watershed 2004 New York Times article to raise general awareness of the problem.  Glazer writes,

In addition to misconstruing words and phrases, the American edition deleted nearly 15 percent of the original French text (about 145 pages), seriously weakening the sections dealing with women's literature and history -- Beauvoir being one of the first to declare these as legitimate subjects for study. Gone were numerous quotations from women's novels and diaries, including those of Virginia Woolf, Colette and Sophie Tolstoy, that she used to support her arguments. Little-known historical accounts of women who defied feminine stereotypes, like Renaissance noblewomen who led armies, also vanished from the English edition.

What went wrong with ''The Second Sex''? The answer may be as simple as the word ''sex.'' When Blanche Knopf, wife of the publisher Alfred A. Knopf and an editor in her own right, bought the book on a trip to France, she was under the impression that it was ''a modern-day sex manual'' akin to the Kinsey report, Deirdre Bair writes in her biography ''Simone de Beauvoir'' (1990). Alfred Knopf, who thought the book ''capable of making a very wide appeal indeed'' among ''young ladies in places like Smith,'' sought out Howard Madison Parshley, a retired professor of zoology who had written a book on human reproduction and regularly reviewed books on sex for The New York Herald Tribune, to translate Beauvoir's book. Parshley knew French only from his years as a student at Boston Latin School and Harvard, and had no training in philosophy -- certainly not in the new movement known as existentialism, of which Beauvoir was an adherent.

Capitalizing on the momentum kicked off by Glazer's article, Anne-Solange Noble, the foreign rights director of Gallimard, convinced Jonathan Cape and Knopf that they had to do a new translation, this time by translators who were feminists, who understood  Beauvoir's arguments, and who would restore the missing 20% of the book. Sheila Malovany-Chevallier and Constance Borde, two Americans living in Paris, won the commission, and, with the support of the Centre National du Livre, the contracts were signed and the re-translating began. (See also Sarah Glazer's 2007 article in Bookforum for more on how this came about.)

Le Monde has the up to date story here.

*For a scholarly accounting of what's missing from the Parshley translation, and some of the issues at stake in translating Beauvoir, here is Margaret Simons's groundbreaking 1983 article, and here is one by Toril Moi from 2001.

I haven't seen the new translation yet, but I hope to get my hands on a copy soon.

Comments

[A Facebook User]

Hi Thanks for posting this -
I heard about the new translation recently and your blog really nicely summarises the story so far.

Its been a while since i read it!

Thanks

[Josephgrinton.wordpress.com]

Thank you. Now I understand why some people insist on reading it in French.

[Lesley]

Janine di Giovanni discussed the new translation on the BBC Radio 4 Start the Week podcast this week.

[Maitresse]

I heard the BBC thing which was pretty funny, because Janine Di Giovanni, bless her heart for trying, really doesn't know what she's talking about, and Tzvetan Todorov chimes in with his wife's opinion of SdB. There's a point to which discussion degrades into gossip in this recording and it's unfortunately the moment they turn to Beauvoir...

[maitresse]

also, I don't see why being a feminist and marrying a hedge fund manager are mutually exclusive. but maybe that's because I'm marrying a trader!

[graduate admissions essay]

Took me time to read all the comments, but I enjoyed the article.

[Mazarine]

Now I understand why those who can read it it French are so scathing (deservedly so, clearly) of the English version. Thanks -- will track it down. And happy new year!

[Hentai]

I mostly agree with you most of the point I have subscribed the feed and looking forward for the followup subscriptions. Nice To Read Your Article

[Natasha]

There's an extremely critical piece by Toril Moi about this new translation in the LRB

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v32/n03/toril-moi/the-adulteress-wife

she simply rips it to shreds. I haven't read the new translation but it is written with characteristic textual rigour and criticises absolutely everything about it, including its genesis (pointing out that they got the contract because they had taught Anne Solange Noble).