Simone de Beauvoir’s translators and the many critics have turned their disputes into a play where each acts the role assigned by theatrical cliché…
As translation contretemps go, the one surrounding French philosopher
Simone de Beauvoir (1908-86) and her foundational work of modern
feminism, Le Deuxième Sexe, first published in two volumes in
French in 1949, remains one of the most tempestuous and fascinating. For
decades, Beauvoir scholars in the English-speaking world bemoaned,
attacked, and sought to replace the widely used 1953 translation by H.M.
Parshley (1884-1953), a zoologist at Smith College who knew little
philosophy or existentialism, had never translated a book from French,
and relied mainly on his undergraduate grasp of the language. A few
years back, they succeeded in getting the rights holders, Gallimard in
France and Alfred A. Knopf and Vintage in the English-speaking world, to
commission a new translation. Now that second version has appeared from
Knopf (The Second Sex, by Simone de Beauvoir, “A New
Translation of the Landmark Classic by Constance Borde and Sheila
Malovany-Chevallier,” with an introduction by Judith Thurman, “Complete
and Unabridged for the First Time”).If Knopf and its partners expected to be showered with feminist
appreciation, they’ve been sorely disappointed. The Norwegian Beauvoir
scholar Toril Moi, a professor at Duke and one of the foremost critics
of Parshley’s translation, savaged the new version in the London
Review of Books. Francine du Plessix Gray, in The New York
Times Book Review, also expressed reservations. How everyone
involved got from vituperative discontent to hopeful triumph and back to
discontent makes an instructive tale in itself and offers some lessons
for what matters and doesn’t in the evolution of a classic.The attack on Parshley’s translation began with Margaret Simons’s
groundbreaking 1983 article, “The Silencing of Simone de Beauvoir: Guess
What’s Missing From The Second Sex?” Simons, a philosophy
professor at Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville, brought
multiple charges against Parshley’s translation. First she pointed out
the enormous cuts that Parshley, at the behest of the publisher, had
made in the text. Simons noticed, for instance, that Parshley tended to
cut Beauvoir’s examples of women’s anger and oppression while preserving
references to men’s feelings. She was the first to spot Parshley’s
truncation by half of Beauvoir’s chapter “The Married Woman” and its
elimination of Beauvoir’s supporting evidence. Simons also pointed out
some fundamental philosophical errors.