The Second Sex Read Free Page B

“the young girl” (by Parshley and other translators of French works), we think it clearly means “girl.”
    We have included all of Beauvoir’s footnotes, and we have added notes of our own when we felt an explanation was necessary. Among other things, they indicate errors in Beauvoir’s text and discrepancies such as erroneous dates. We corrected misspellings of names without noting them. Beauvoir sometimes puts into quotes passages that she is partially or completely paraphrasing. We generally left them that way. The reader will notice that titles of the French books she cites are given in French, followed by their translation in English. The translation is in italics if it is in a published English-language edition; it is in roman if it is our translation. We supply the sources of the English translations of the authors Beauvoir cites at the end of the book.
    We did not, however, facilitate the reading by explaining arcane references or difficult philosophical language. As an example of the former, in Part Three of Volume II, “Justifications,” there is a reference to Cécile Sorel breaking the glass of a picture frame holding a caricature of her by an artist named Bib. The reference might have been as obscure in 1949 as it is today.
    Our notes do not make for an annotated version of the translation, yet we understand the value such a guide would have for both the teacher and the individual reading it on their own. We hope one can be written now that this more precise translation exists.
    These are but a few of the issues we dealt with. We had instructive discussions with generous experts about these points and listened to many (sometimes contradictory) opinions; but in the end, the final decisions as to how to treat the translation were ours.
    It is generally agreed that one of the most serious absences in the first translation was Simone de Beauvoir the philosopher. Much work has been done on reclaiming, valorizing, and expanding upon her role as philosopher since the 1953 publication, thanks to the scholarship of Margaret Simons, Eva Lundgren-Gothlin, Michèle Le Doeuff, Elizabeth Fallaize, Emily Grosholz, Sonia Kruks, and Ingrid Galster, to mention only a few. We were keenly aware of the need to put the philosopher back into her text. To transpose her philosophical style and voice into English was the most crucial task we faced.
    The first English-language translation did not always recognize the philosophical terminology in
The Second Sex
. Take the crucial word “authentic,” meaning “to be in good faith.” As Toril Moi points out, Parshley changed it into “real, genuine, and true.” The distinctive existentialist term
pour-soi
, usually translated as “for-itself” (
pour-soi
referring to human consciousness), became “her true nature in itself.” Thus, Parshley’s “being-in-itself” (
en-soi
, lacking human consciousness) is a reversal ofSimone de Beauvoir’s meaning. Margaret Simons and Toril Moi have unearthed and brought to light many other examples, such as the use of “alienation,” “alterity,” “subject,” and the verb “to posit,” which are by now well documented. One particularly striking example is the title of Volume II;
“L’expérience vécue”
(“Lived Experience”) was translated as “Woman’s Life Today,” weakening the philosophical tenor of the French.
    The Second Sex
is a philosophical treatise and one of the most important books of the twentieth century, upon which much of the modern feminist movement was built. Beauvoir the philosopher is present right from the start of the book, building on the ideas of Hegel, Marx, Kant, Heidegger, Husserl, and others. She developed, shared, and appropriated these concepts alongside her equally brilliant contemporaries Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and Lévi-Strauss, who were redefining philosophy to fit the times. Before it was published, Beauvoir read Lévi-Strauss’s
Elementary Structures of Kinship
and learned from