Translating The Second Sex

Sixty years to the month after Le Deuxième Sexe came out—in November 2009—a new English translation of this major work was published by Jonathan Cape in the United Kingdom; publisher Alfred A. Knopf released the American and Canadian edition a few months later in April 2010. It was in November of 1949 that Les Editions Gallimard published Le Deuxième Sexe. Simone de Beauvoir once said in her youth that literature had the quality of assuring her an immortality that would make up for lost eternity. Indeed, if ever a work would assure immortality, The Second Sex—translated into English in 1953—would be that work. Nothing she had done or written, or wrote thereafter, compares with the impact of The Second Sex on France, on the world, and on history.

The sublime and daunting task of re-translating this great work for the first time in its entirety fell to us, two Americans living in France since 1964. During that time, we were witness to the rise of the French feminist movement, which recalled for us the blossoming of our 1960s college-years feminism into a full-grown social movement. Certainly, one of Beauvoir’s many attractions for us was her interest in the United States just at the time of writing The Second Sex. In 1947 she made a long and ambitious trip to the United States and visited, often by Greyhound, universities such as Smith, Vassar, and Oberlin. This trip is the subject of her work L’Amérique au jour le jour (America Day by Day, 1948). Beauvoir was fascinated by American women and racial issues: she met and became friends with Richard Wright, Nelson Algren became her American lover, and she was reading Gunnar Myrdal’s book on America, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (1944). The Second Sex is full of references to America and American women and men. She saw in action what it meant to be the Other and came face to face with the master-slave relationship and other fundamental issues from probing into American society. Her gaze on American culture and the way she extracted ideas from it for The Second Sex, coupled with our own experience and knowledge of the two cultures and languages, informed our approach to the translation.

Ours is not the first translation of Le Deuxième Sexe into English, but it is the first complete and unabridged one. Howard M. Parshley, a zoology professor from Smith College, did the 1953 translation, but upon the insistence of his publishers, Alfred and Blanche Knopf, he abridged and edited passages, restructured Beauvoir’s syntax and style, and simplified much of the complex philosophical language.

Our translation was no ordinary undertaking. A new translation of The Second Sex had been ardently desired and awaited for many years, above all by academics who have been using and teaching the first version and who have long been dissatisfied with it. To steal Beauvoir’s phrase, much ink has flowed on the subject of the English version. Margaret Simons, one of the great experts on Beauvoir, from the University of Southern Illinois, brought the issue of the faulty translation to the attention of the public as early as 1983 in a path-breaking article, “The Silencing of Simone de Beauvoir: Guess What’s Missing from The Second Sex,” and then in a book, Beauvoir and “The Second Sex” (1999), about the need for a new translation. Another and more important reason why this is no ordinary translation is that The Second Sex is encyclopedic in nature: eight-hundred pages on biology, psychology, anthropology, ethnology, social science, history, folklore, literature, economic systems, labor movements, religion, laws and, most important, myths about women and their liberation.

Even with the truncated and problematic earlier version that many of us read in the sixties, this work—sometimes called the “Bible” or the keystone in women’s history—has been foundational for feminist studies, transatlantic feminism, feminist literary criticism, history, philosophy, political philosophy, and other areas. Yet Beauvoir did not consider herself to be a feminist...