From "The Second Sex" by Simone de Beauvoir. A translation

Abstract

Simone de Beauvoir's most famous text in Anglo-America is “The Second Sex”. It became influential in English when an American Zoologist (Parshley) translated the text in 1953 and published the text under Knopf. Although primarily emphasizing the significance of source text, this project also accounts for both the Parshley as well as the recent Constance and Borde translation (2009). Parshley's translation became controversial once feminist academics, Margret A. Simons and Toril Moi, drew attention to misrepresentations and omissions that appeared to be both technical and ideological errors. The most controversial alteration was that Parshley cut up to 15 percent of the original text, thus doing violence through omission. My translation is a faithful attempt to render the culture of the source text into accessible English.  My preface identifies the tension between Anglophone and Francophone cultures that frame the feminist criticism of Parshley. The result is a negotiation of my identity as a translator by qualifying my own existential “situatedness” through roleplaying theory.