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Books

The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir

Emily Anne Parker has a second look at The Second Sex.

A retranslation of Simone de Beauvoir’s landmark feminist philosophical work of 1949, Le deuxième sexe, appeared in April. The original French edition unprecedentedly raised the question of woman: who is she, really? This dynamic question endures after centuries of struggles for equality. Beauvoir asked, why should a woman feel internally compelled to answer this question not in relation to her own lived singularity – as she exists for herself – but instead according to ill-fitting myths?

Retranslations of such important works are inevitably important. As the new translators Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier themselves point out, translations date easily because of the inevitable traces of the translator’s own voice. Thus, new translations on the basis of improvements in scholarship are necessary to reintroduce a classic to new generations of readers who cannot read the original in its original language.

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