This post is a summary of Toril Moi’s “While We Wait: The English Translation of The Second Sex,” published in Signs (Volume 27, no. 4) in 2002. My goal here is to get those FMH readers who are actually reading The Second Sex in advance of Friday’s discussion about it this information; Most of you don’t have access to academic journals, and would otherwise be in the dark on some pretty important stuff. Those who are not reading the book may still find this summary useful; Moi’s article and the writing of this post certainly helped me understand Beauvoir’s text much better.

I include several excerpts and many shorter quotations from Moi’s original article in this summary, but I have tried to make sure that I’m in compliance with fair use requirements. The information and ideas are all Moi’s. If you do have access to a university library, I highly recommend her work, particularly What is a Woman? and Other Essays.

On to the summary.

The first critique of H. M. Parshley’s 1953 translation was made by Margaret Simons in 1983 (”The Silencing of Simone de Beauvoir: Guess What’s Missing from The Second Sex”). This led to a “new wave of rigorous Beauvoir scholarship,” but more must be done to secure “her place in the history of philosophy”.

The translation is even worse than Simons thought, especially in terms of philosophical shortcomings. Parshley “edited” out several hundred pages of text, and his translation includes further omissions and errors on every page.

Until an adequate translation is published, scholars need to understand the book as Beauvoir actually wrote it. This article therefore:

1. draws on Simons and Fallaize to discuss the omissions
2. shows how “the philosophical incompetence of the translation produces a text that is damaging to Beauvoir’s reputation in particular and to the reputation of feminist philosophy in general, and that the translation at times makes it difficult to discover what Beauvoir actually thought about important feminist issues.”
3. discusses how the current translation came to be and whether a new edition is likely in the near future (remember, Moi wrote this article in 2002).

Cuts/omissions

Parshley’s cuts are not noted in the English translation’s text. Major problems:

• References to female historical figures and socialist feminism are removed and the entire section on history has been slashed dramatically;
• Descriptions of women’s anger and oppression have been cut, while references to men’s feelings have been retained; and
• “Parshley… systematically deleted misogynist diatribes [cited by Beauvoir] and feminist arguments” (Simons 562). Example:

Literal translation [of Beauvoir’s text]: “The legend that claims that the ravished Sabine women opposed their ravishers with stubborn sterility, also tells us that the men magically overcame their resistance by beating them with leather straps.”

Parshley’s translation: “In the legend of the Sabine women, the latter soon abandoned their plan of remaining sterile to punish their ravishers” (Moi 1009).

•  Half the chapter on “The Married Woman” is omitted;
• Parshley routinely cuts references to French sources while adding or expanding references to American sources;
• “Whole pages consist of a mishmash of half sentences and summaries cobbled together in a mess which cannot be dignified with the name of translation” (Fallaize).
• Throughout, Parshley’s cuts targeted Beauvoir’s “extensive documentation of women’s lived experience,” making the text seem like opinion rather than evidence-based analysis. This targeting makes critics who have not read the French original think that Beauvoir was male-identified, or that she didn’t think about women.
• Parshley covers the holes he’s cut in the text by rewriting the original; the results are often bizarre and make it seem like Beauvoir does not understand the scholars to which she refers, as Parshley himself was unfamiliar with them.
• Parshley frequently deletes all or part of sentences, but does not note as much. A “crucial omission from the introduction:”

Literal translation [of Beauvoir’s text]: “Clearly, no woman can without bad faith [i.e., without denying her choice, responsibility, and freedom] claim to be situated beyond her sex”…

The sentence disappears from a particularly important juncture in the text, namely, the moment where Beauvoir is discussing the hopeless “choice” between having to claim that women are essentially different from men or that they are simply human beings, just like men. This sentence is the first step toward Beauvoir’s radical reformulation of the question of women’s difference. In general, Parshley’s translation makes it very difficult to see that Beauvoir has a coherent and deeply original philosophy of sexed subjectivity, one that never degenerates into a general theory of “femininity” or “difference” (Moi 1012).

Errors due to Parshley’s lack of philosophical training

Existentialist vocabulary repurposes words we already use everyday. Parshley was unfamiliar with the Existentialists, and therefore consistently mistranslated Beauvoir’s philosophical discussions. Most importantly, he translates the word authentique, by which Beauvoir means something like `recognizing one’s own freedom and the responsibility which comes with it,’  as genuine. Since much of the book deals with “the ways in which a sexist society encourages women to… hide their freedom, their status as subjects [”people who `assume’ or `shoulder’ their freedom”], from themselves,” this mistranslation has the effect of turning “her questions about women’s freedom into moralizing semtimentality:”

Literal translation [of Beauvoir’s text]: “For maternal devotion can be lived in perfect authenticity; but in fact this is rarely the case.”

Parshley:  “For while maternal devotion may be perfectly genuine, this, in fact, is rarely the case” (Moi 1014).

Moi mentions four other particularly important types of mistakes, though she indicates that this is an incomplete list:

• Parshley translates terms for existence into essence; this is important because one of Beauvoir’s central ideas is that “women are made, not born.” She and her existentialist colleagues adamantly disbelieved theories that people had essential natures.
• Parshley often translates words for subjectivity, meant to describe “people who `assume’ or `shoulder’ their freedom,” as “`unsystematic,’ ‘personal,’ or ‘not objective.’”
• Parshley misses constant references to Hegel, inserting concepts Beauvoir did not (ego, for example), denying women’s agency, and hiding Beauvoir’s radical repurposing of Hegel;
• and particularly, Parshley does not know that “alienation” is a philosophical term; he’s familiar with the term as it is used in psychoanalysis, which screws up his translation of her theory re: “women’s subjectivity under patriarchy.”

Moi further discusses the consequences of Parshley’s errors for philosophers trying to understand Beauvoir’s work; Suffice it to say that the translation both makes it look like Beauvoir misunderstands the thinkers whose ideas she bases her own work on, and because it suggests that Beauvoir is a Cartesian (that is, it suggests that she believes in the mind-body split) when in fact she rejects Cartesian conceptions of what humans are.

Errors in the chapter on motherhood

In essence, Parshley’s very poor French led him to make a bunch of basic mistakes in this section — and the result is that in the English version, Beauvoir seems to hate motherhood.

Literal translation: “I should add that given the lack of appropriately
organized day nurseries and kindergartens, having a child is enough to paralyze a woman’s activity entirely.”
Parshley: “It must be said in addition that in spite of convenient day nurseries and kindergartens, having a child is enough to paralyze a woman’s activity entirely” (Moi 1025).

Another example: Beauvoir thinks that having a child can be “an exercise of freedom, autonomy, and choice” if women have free access to contraception and abortion (which wasn’t available in postwar France, Beauvoir’s time and place), and therefore something any good existentialist would approve of quite heartily. In Parshley’s translation, her statements to that effect are turned into meaningless “sentimental pieties about `solemn obligations.’”

History of the Parshley translation/likelihood of a new one in the near future

In summary: Parshley meant well, and his is advocacy was instrumental in getting an English translation into bookstores. He thought The Second Sex was an important work. However, he lacked the linguistic skills and philosophical knowledge to translate it. Also, he was a product of a sexist environment; try as he might to avoid it, sexism crept into his work.

Moi calls for a new translation, preferably a scholarly edition which would provide readers with background historical and philosophical information so that they can understand the text on their own.

Works cited:

Fallaize, Elizabeth. “The Housewife’s Destiny: Translating Simone de Beauvoir’s ‘The Married Woman.”‘ In Cinquentenaire du deuxieme sexe 2002, ed. Christine Delphy and Sylvie Chaperon. Paris: Syllepse

Moi, Toril. “While We Wait: The English Translation of The Second Sex.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 2002, vol. 27, no. 4, The University of Chicago (Chicago).

Simons, Margaret A. “The Silencing of Simone de Beauvoir: Guess What’s Missing from The Second Sex.” Women’s Studies International Forum 1983, 6(5): 559-64.