The Impact of the New Translation of The Second Sex: 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."³

While 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...