Monthly Archives: December 2009

A second Second Sex

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Simone-de-beauvoir
 
Anglophone feminists, rejoice! The new English translation of Simone de Beauvoir's masterpiece The Second Sex was published in the UK this week by Jonathan Cape (with the American edition set for publication by Knopf in April 2010).

Viewed by many as feminism's foundational text, Gallimard published The Second Sex in two volumes (to mixed reviews) in 1949.  It sold extremely well (200,000 copies in its first week), and garnered Beauvoir followers in sectors of the French population who might otherwise have avoided the kind of philosophical treatises she was trained to write. The Second Sex broke down barriers, not least those of class and education.

An English translation appeared in the US in 1953, and was a bestseller there, too.  Except that the translation was performed by a zoologist, one H.M. Parshley, who struggled no doubt valiantly but produced quite a sub-par rendering of Beauvoir's idiosyncratic French prose. Also, he cut about 20% of the book, which he felt was irrelevant.

Beauvoir scholars have been saying for years that a new translation was desperately needed,* but it took Sarah Glazer's watershed 2004 New York Times article to raise general awareness of the problem.  Glazer writes,

In addition to misconstruing words and phrases, the American edition
deleted nearly 15 percent of the original French text (about 145
pages), seriously weakening the sections dealing with women's
literature and history — Beauvoir being one of the first to declare
these as legitimate subjects for study. Gone were numerous quotations
from women's novels and diaries, including those of Virginia Woolf,
Colette and Sophie Tolstoy, that she used to support her arguments.
Little-known historical accounts of women who defied feminine
stereotypes, like Renaissance noblewomen who led armies, also vanished
from the English edition.

What went wrong with ''The Second
Sex''? The answer may be as simple as the word ''sex.'' When Blanche
Knopf, wife of the publisher Alfred A. Knopf and an editor in her own
right, bought the book on a trip to France, she was under the
impression that it was ''a modern-day sex manual'' akin to the Kinsey
report, Deirdre Bair writes in her biography ''Simone de Beauvoir''
(1990). Alfred Knopf, who thought the book ''capable of making a very
wide appeal indeed'' among ''young ladies in places like Smith,''
sought out Howard Madison Parshley, a retired professor of zoology who
had written a book on human reproduction and regularly reviewed books
on sex for The New York Herald Tribune, to translate Beauvoir's book.
Parshley knew French only from his years as a student at Boston Latin
School and Harvard, and had no training in philosophy — certainly not
in the new movement known as existentialism, of which Beauvoir was an
adherent.

Capitalizing on the momentum kicked off by Glazer's article, Anne-Solange Noble, the foreign rights director of Gallimard, convinced Jonathan Cape and Knopf that they had to do a new translation, this time by translators who were feminists, who understood  Beauvoir's arguments, and who would restore the missing 20% of the book. Sheila Malovany-Chevallier and Constance Borde, two Americans living in Paris, won the commission, and, with the support of the Centre National du Livre, the contracts were signed and the re-translating began. (See also Sarah Glazer's 2007 article in Bookforum for more on how this came about.)

Le Monde has the up to date story here.

*For a scholarly accounting of what's missing from the Parshley translation, and some of the issues at stake in translating Beauvoir, here is Margaret Simons's groundbreaking 1983 article, and here is one by Toril Moi from 2001.

I haven't seen the new translation yet, but I hope to get my hands on a copy soon.

writing & residing at Shakespeare & Co.

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If you aren't already subscribed to the Shakespeare & Co email newsletter, I highly recommend you put yourself on the list. Every month they send out a message stuffed with interesting tidbits, quotes, reviews, ideas, and news about upcoming events at the shop. You can sign up at their site, look in the upper left-hand corner for the words "sign up here".

This month's newsletter includes a few words from Michael Smith, author of The Giro Playboy and most recently Shakespeare & Co's writer-in-residence, on his time living above the bookshop in the special room reserved for visiting writers (which I hope he doesn't mind my excerpting here):

I had wanted to stay ever since a friend told me about
this mythical room years ago, and now here I was, sitting at the big
wooden desk below the guilded [sic] Belle Epoque mirror, hammering the words
out while ‘Three Blind Mice’ peeled out from the bells of Notre Dame
beyond the tall French windows… its gothic towers dominated the view
from the little room covered floor to ceiling in rare and wonderful
books… if you closed your eyes and reached out and picked one, it was
virtually guaranteed to be fascinating… the place is a “free
university” indeed… I would take a breather from the writing and the
books and wander over the bridges of the islands while the Seine flowed
beneath and Paris played out her promise to inspire the best in us…
one afternoon I ended up in the Marais, and Proust’s writing room,
which was covered in cork so he could work without the city sounds
distracting him; I loved it; I thought my room, alive with the sounds
of unfamiliar French police sirens and the ding dang dong of Notre Dame
was better… one evening I found out Burroughs had written parts of
Junkie or Naked Lunch in the same room I was staying in, and later on a
great dirty cockroach scurried across the desk and winked at me from
behind my cheese plate… the little bastard was a living link to a
great and noble tradition, I thought, and I was very happy to be
sharing that room and that tradition with him… so as I sit here now,
remembering it all in the East End of London, I raise a glass to that
noble tradition, and to Shakespeare and Co, and to all who sail in her. –Michael Smith

I'm not sure I would have found the cockroach as inspiring as he did (which is why I'm glad I'm a writer with my own roach-free apartment here in Paris), but the rest sounds pretty great.

Women and the Occupation of Paris

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You might remember that last year I mentioned there was a controversy here in Paris over an exhibit at the Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris showing a number of photographs by André Zucca of a very normal-looking Paris under the Nazi Occupation.

That controversy lives again in a very fine essay by Ian Buruma in this week's New York Review of Books:

When a cache of these pictures was exhibited at the Bibliothèque
Historique de la Ville de Paris last year, the press reacted with
dismay. How could this "celebration of the victor," "underlining the
sweetness of life in an occupied country," take place "without any
explanation"?

Buruma has an interesting take. "Perhaps there should have been more explanation," he writes,

but the pictures
are only tendentious in what they do not show. You don't see people
being rounded up. There is only one blurred image of an old woman
walking along the rue de Rivoli wearing a yellow star. There are no
photographs of endless queues in front of half-empty food stores. There
are no pictures of Drancy, where Jews were held in appalling conditions
before being transported east in cattle trains. But what Zucca's
pictures do show, always in fine Agfacolor weather, is still revealing.
They are disturbing to the modern viewer precisely because of their
peculiar air of normality, the sense of life going on while atrocities
were happening, as it were, around the corner.

Buruma effectively illustrates that there were at least two Parises under the Occupation, one normal one, for non-Jews, and one of "barbarity and evil, represented by this yellow star," as Hélène Berr wrote in her journal.  Apart from those suffering deportation and death, the vast majority of Parisians under the Occupation were "just trying to get by." 

What is interesting in Buruma's piece is his discussion of French journalist Patrick Buisson's 1940–1945 Années érotiques, which examines the way the body of the "Boche's girl," the French women accused of horizontal collaboration, became a site of conflict, occupation, and collaboration as much as Paris itself. Buisson "shows

that the presence of large numbers of German soldiers meant
liberation of a kind for large numbers of French women: young women
rebelling against the authoritarian strictures of bourgeois life,
middle-aged spinsters yearning for romance, widows, women alone, women
in bad marriages, and so on. Buisson does not ask us to admire these
tens of thousands of women engaging in "horizontal collaboration," but
to comprehend the complexity of their motives.

He is scornful of the movie stars, fashion folks, and social
climbers who did better than most, thanks to their German contacts or
lovers: Arletty, Coco Chanel, Suzy Solidor, et al. But he is just as
hard on the men who took their revenge after the war on the army of
unknown women who had strayed into German arms. Such women were
stripped naked and paraded through the streets, shorn of their hair,
their bodies daubed with swastikas, jeered at by the mob. Buisson
writes:

When the Germans were defeated, or about to be defeated,
the "Boche's girl" served as a substitute to prolong a battle that no
longer held any dangers and affirmed a manliness that had not always
been employed in other circumstances….

At last year's MLA in San Francisco, I gave a talk about Claude Cahun's wartime resistance activities on the Channel island of Jersey on a panel entitled "French Women Write the Résistance." We had a serious turnout given that the panel was at 8:30 in the morning, and during the discussion section a rigorous debate took place, which indicated to us (confirmed by this article) that this is very much a discussion people want to be thinking about right now, and thinking about in new ways. Couching the discussion of French resistance and collaboration in gendered terms seems to be one of these productive ways of re-thinking this historical moment. My co-panelists and I have put together a book proposal on the topic, which I believe is on submission at UPenn UP, so we'll see how that goes.

Meanwhile, do read Buruma's essay.

Rose Alley

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Rose My review of Jeremy M. Davies's recent novel Rose Alley is up over at The Second Pass.

An excerpt:

“The authentic experiences of the nineteen sixties will be composed
of memories that will be a little bit mistaken.” Thus runs the
epigraph, by F.T. Castle, to Jeremy M. Davies’ Rose Alley,
and it’s as good a description of the novel as any. Ostensibly about
the filming of an avant-garde film set in Paris during the student
riots of May 1968, it is more of an album de famille, a series of portraits of the eccentric personalities collaborating on the film.

Also called Rose Alley, the film is a Restoration drama
about the ambush of Poet Laureate John Dryden in an alleyway near
Covent Garden in 1679 by thugs working for John Wilmot, Earl of
Rochester, a rather bawdy fellow poet who was angered by Dryden’s essay
on satire (and jealous of his favor with the king). But this historical
kerfuffle is not the point. The point is, the film just can’t get made.
Or rather, what gets made is in no way a fulfillment of the original
idea.

The novel is structured as a trip into the archives of the film,
decades later, compiled and catalogued by an unidentified narrator. You
read it as if you’ve found a scrapbook of people you don’t know. (This
involves a lot of rereading and cross-checking to make sure you’ve got
everyone straight in your head; Davies has anticipated this, and has
helpfully provided an index.) One by one, Davies trains his lens on the
producer, director, leading lady, screenwriter, and assorted members of
the cast and crew, zooming in tightly to look for the wrinkles and
pockmarks, and just as the frame clicks into focus — just as we think
we have a handle on this terribly strange and specific character — we
cut to someone else.

Until the image clarifies, the characters feel as if they’re always
getting away from us; peculiar details stand out, but the rest of the
image blurs. “Here was the faux Jew with his six gold Stars of David
swinging between open fifth and fourth shirt buttons, and then the real
one with his Flemish accent, ersatz Spanish name, and Moorish features
embalmed in a pale Northern face.” The screenwriter was raised by
parents who stuttered so badly that they communicated exclusively by
whistling the choruses of popular tunes: “He proposed with ‘Who Takes
Care of the Caretaker’s Daughter’ — risky — and she accepted with ‘Deed
I Do.’ ” The oddities of these deeply flawed characters are like
nothing you’ve ever read in fiction; Dickensian with a dollop of
Pynchon, or Barnesian (Djuna, that is) with a veneer of Nabokov.
Cheeky, but brilliant, the novel is so sexual it can’t keep its hands
to itself.