Translating Simone de Beauvoir’s the Second Sex: Transnational Framing, Interpretation, and Impact

This collection offers insights into the transnational and translingual implications of Simone de Beauvoir’s Le Deuxième Sexe (The Second Sex), a text that has served as foundational for feminisms worldwide since its publication in 1949.

Little scholarly attention has been devoted to how the original French-language source text made its way into languages other than English. This is a shocking omission, given that many (but by no means all) other translations were based on the 1953 English translation by Howard M. Parshley, which has been widely criticized by Beauvoir scholars for its omissions and careless attention to its philosophical implications. This volume seeks to fill this gap in scholarship with an innovative collection of essays that interrogate the ways that Beauvoir’s essay has shifted in meaning and significance as it has travelled across the globe.

This volume brings together for the first time scholars from Translation Studies, Literary Studies and Philosophical Studies, and over half of it is dedicated to non-Western European engagements with Le Deuxième Sexe (including chapters on the Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, Hungarian and Polish translations). As such, this collection will be essential to any scholar of Beauvoir’s philosophy and its contributions to feminist discourses.

Julia C. Bullock is Professor of Japanese Studies at Emory University, USA. She is the author of The Other Women’s Lib (2010) and Coeds Ruining the Nation (2019); and co-editor of Rethinking Japanese Feminisms (2017) and Translating Feminism (2021). She is currently working on a book provisionally titled Beauvoir in Japan.

Pauline Henry-Tierney is Lecturer in French and Translation Studies at Newcastle University, UK. She is Managing Editor of the award-winning international journal, Simone de Beauvoir Studies. Her monograph Translating Transgressive Texts: Gender, Sexuality and the Body in Contemporary Women’s Writing in French is forthcoming with Routledge.