Toril Moi
“While We Wait: The English Translation of The Second Sex”
- Margret Simon’s critique of the translation by H.M. Parshley
- NEED for new translation
- Increase in reading of Beauvoir and feminist theory
- The Second Sex, almost 1000 pages long
- English translation have omissions and mistakes on every page
Publishers:
Knopf – hardback
Vintage – paperback
(both of Random House)
= knew of the problems since the early 1980’s… “The Second Sex” was published in 1949, first translated in 1953 by Parshley
Essay by Elizabeth Fallaize
The Translation
- Damaging to Beauvoir’s intellectual reputation
- Difficult to discover what Beauvoir actually thought about important feminist issues
Cuts and Omissions
- Parshley wanted to omit the equivalent of 145 pages from the original two volume 972 pg French edition — 15% of the text
- “translated and edited by Parshley”
- “edited” missing in 1953 edition
History of Women
- cut 78 women’s names and eradicated just about every reference to socialist feminism
- Middle Ages section left with a 1/3 of the original length
- Cut descriptions of women’s oppression and anger, while keeping intact references to men’s feelings
- #1
Omissions
- 35 pages, ½ of chapter on “The Married Woman” was cut by P.
- removes quotations from French sources while occasionally expanding B’s references to American culture
- eliminates her copious literary references
- !!!!! comes across as B’s opinion rather than a well-supported analysis of a specific historical and cultural situation
Beauvoir
“male-identified”
- cuts Virginia Woolf, no mention of her
- not ideologically innocent
Moi on Eleven pages of Housework
- seven quotations of different people
- none are in translation
Beauvoir discusses Hegel’s analysis of marriage
**Parshley’s translation is a summary of a quotation from Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit.
- Which covers over half a page is B’s text
- B did not write this, neither did Hegel
- #2
#3 Existentialist vocabulary
- Authentique
- Carried out in good faith, not trying to deny freedom and responsibilities
- “inauthentic”
- The text analyzes the way in which sexist society tells women to be “inauthentic”
- Translating that word as “genuine” “real” “true” turns her “questions about women’s freedom into moralizing sentimentality” (IN TEXT)
Four points on page 1014
- Beauvoir’s existence, Parshley’s essence
- “existence precedes essence”
- women are made, not born
- “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.”
- “existence precedes essence”
- Subjectivity
- Sujet
- Sometimes “subject”
- Theory goes out the window
- Sujet
- Hiding Hegel
- Unaware of references to Hegel
- “poser” – ordinary French verb
- B uses it where she speaks of the subject (either a person or a group)
- “positing itself”
- Hegel’s development of the self-conscious subjectivity in the master-slave dialectic
- Never translates “poser” philosophically
- “regards”
- “assumes”
- “positing itself”
- B uses it where she speaks of the subject (either a person or a group)
- “stand face to face with”
- “readily volunteer to become”
- Alienation alienated
- aliénation – used in terms of Lacan and Hegel
- as “projection”
- footnote to Lacan
- question her understanding of Lacan
- footnote to Lacan
Traduced by translation
- First example of transgender people
Letter to the Publishers
- Responses from Knopf and Vintage
- Answers 3 months later saying…
- Parshley never translated French… his hermeneutic motion “” (1030-1031)
- Beauvoir’s thoughts on book “”
- Her thoughts after reading Simons’ essay (1032)