A new translation of Simone de Beauvoir’s landmark feminist philosophical work of 1949, Le deuxième sexe, appeared in April of 2010. The 1949 two-volume Gallimard edition unprecedentedly raised the question of woman: what is the ethical status of this name? This dynamic question, Beauvoir notes, endures after centuries of changing political preoccupations, economic situations, religions and scientific revolutions. Beauvoir asks why women do not pose this question for themselves—in terms of their own lived singularity, as each woman exists for herself—but rather always according to ill-fitting and contradictory myths.
Retranslations of this philosophical text are inevitably important. After H.M. Parshley’s 1952 translation a series of errors came to light, but a lack of will on the part of Knopf and Random House publishing meant that they did not sign a deal to start a new translation until 2006. As translators Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier themselves point out, all translations become easily dated because of the inevitable traces of the translator’s own voice. If that is true, the Parshley translation is about as out of date as a bowler hat. On the other hand, new translations based on improvements in scholarship are always necessary to reintroduce a classic to new generations of readers who cannot read the text in its original language.
While there is still much interpretive dispute regarding The Second Sex, there are many reasons to affirm that no matter how shattering the conversation in the Luxembourg Gardens might have been, Beauvoir contributed an unmatched philosophical vocabulary to gender studies, existential phenomenology as well as literature. As Beauvoir puts it in her Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, finding out that one’s “opinions were based only on prejudice, dishonesty, or hastily formed concepts” (344) is the catalyst of most all philosophical thinking (one need only to think of Hume awakening Kant from his dogmatic slumber). The conversation in the gardens with Sartre shows the power of reflective conversation to awaken ideas and challenge preconceptions, a skill that Beauvoir surely possessed before that day. Margaret Simons has made clear that we no longer have reason to take this story as proof that Beauvoir deferred to Sartre. In part due to the persistence of Simons, but also due to Beauvoir’s consent and Sylvie le Bon’s willingness to carry out Beauvoir’s wishes, a series of books has been released this year that further attests to her ingenuity as a thinker.
Interpretations of The Second Sex took a sharp turn in 1985 when Hypatia held the Women’s Studies International Forum—a special symposium to mark the release of the English translation of The Second Sex more than thirty years earlier. Before the symposium, a few pivotal works published on Beauvoir coloured the landscape of interpretation and mostly interpreted her as a student of Sartre or as having applied his ontology to the situation of women. As the philosophical insensitivities, inaccuracies and deletions of the Parshley translation were under discussion, and as scholars came to see the richness ofThe Second Sex, reception and commentary began to shift towards a more charitable and phenomenological reading of the work (rather than as a sociological or personal text on “women’s issues”).