While We Wait: Notes on the English Translation of The Second Sex

That the English translation of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sexis bad has been well known ever since Margaret Simons published her ground-breaking essay ‘The Silencing of Simone de Beauvoir: Guess What’s Missing from The Second Sex’in 1983. So why write another essay on the same topic twenty years later? The first and most obvious reason is that English-speaking readers still have to use the text so cogently criticized by Simons, namely H. M. Parshley’s ‘edition and translation’.

Duke Scholars

Author Toril Moi Literature