This chapter is a reprint of a book review of the new translation of The Second Sex, which raises questions about its success in rendering Beauvoir’s thought into English. Siding with critical scholars like Toril Moi, Bauer argues that Borde and Malovany-Chevallier’s translation is disappointing. The translation obscures Beauvoir’s philosophical insights by too often sacrificing readability and clear renditions of Beauvoir’s reasoning to word-by-word translations of Beauvoir’s long sentences and uncommon stylistic choices. This is due to the inexperience of the translators, who, Bauer claims, had never before translated such French theoretical writing and had no experience dealing with the “conceptual and rhetorical challenges” of Le deuxiéme sexe. Overall, Bauer’s review echoes the long history of the discounting of and underappreciation of feminist work as reflected in translation practices that assume women’s interests, writing, and scholarship to be tangential to scholarly research.
In January of 1947, Simone de Beauvoir flew from Paris to New York to begin her first tour of the United States. It was to be a momentous four months. Under the auspices of the French government, Beauvoir gave two dozen lectures at colleges and universities across the country on the topic “the ethical problems of the post-war writer.” Her friendship with the novelist Richard Wright and his wife, Ellen, who took her under their wing during her whirlwind first weeks in New York, sensitized her to the pervasiveness of racism that she would witness in America, which she chronicled with startling (and, still, underappreciated) insight in ...
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