H. M. Parshley

H. M. Parshley was the translator of the first English edition of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, published in 1953. His version introduced the book to English-language readers, but its abridgments and editorial simplifications also obscured important elements of Beauvoir’s voice and philosophy, making Parshley a central figure in the history of the work’s translation and reception.

Commission and First Edition

Blanche Knopf encountered The Second Sex while scouting books in Paris. She initially regarded the striking literary property as a highbrow sex manual and asked H. M. Parshley, a retired professor of zoology at Smith College, to assess it. Parshley’s report praised the book as intelligent, learned, and balanced, and said it was not feminist in a doctrinaire sense. His enthusiasm secured him the commission to translate the work, although his professional background was in zoology rather than philosophy or French literature.

The English edition appeared in 1953. Alfred A. Knopf asked Parshley to condense the text, objecting to what he saw as Beauvoir’s excessive verbal expansiveness. Parshley then sought Beauvoir’s advice about the minor cuts and abridgments the publisher considered necessary for the American market. After a period without a reply, he received an indignant letter from her warning that material she considered important would be omitted. She nevertheless gave her approval to the edition.

Abridgment and Philosophical Loss

The published translation was a labor of love for Parshley, but it was also abridged and edited. Some of Beauvoir’s complex philosophical language was simplified; long, dense paragraphs were changed to fit more conventional English punctuation and style, and some passages were removed altogether. Later translators emphasized that these long paragraphs were not incidental bulk: their unfolding form was integral to the development of Beauvoir’s reasoning. Cutting sentences and paragraphs therefore altered not only the amount of material available to readers but also the way the argument moved.

The philosophical consequences could be substantial. The existentialist term pour-soi, conventionally rendered as for-itself and referring to human consciousness, was translated by Parshley as her true nature in itself. That phrasing confused Beauvoir’s meaning with the opposing concept of en-soi, or being-in-itself, which describes existence lacking human consciousness. The translation thus did not merely replace a technical term with a looser equivalent; it reversed a distinction central to the philosophical framework.

Other revisions also weakened the book’s conceptual precision. Parshley rendered the word authentic as real, genuine, or true, although in the relevant existentialist usage it means to be in good faith. The French title of the second volume, L’expérience vécue, meaning Lived Experience, became Woman’s Life Today, diminishing its philosophical emphasis. Terms such as alienation, alterity, subject, and to posit likewise became points of concern in later scholarship and reassessment.

Later Translation and Reassessment

Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier’s translation was presented as the first complete English version of The Second Sex and the first since Parshley’s. They restored cuts, retained Beauvoir’s philosophical language, and sought to preserve the long paragraphs, complicated syntax, punctuation, and distinctive usages of the 1949 text rather than modernize or simplify them. Their account of the task treated the book’s form as part of its argument: Beauvoir’s prose had a consistent grammar, and that grammar followed a logic.

The translators also rejected changes that would make the text easier for a contemporary audience at the cost of its historical voice. For instance, they did not introduce the modern use of the word gender into Beauvoir’s 1949 language. Their work was shaped by the recognition that Parshley’s version had not consistently conveyed the philosopher in the author. The renewed attention to Beauvoir’s philosophical role, supported by later scholarship, made the technical decisions in the new translation especially consequential.

Significance

Parshley’s translation occupies a double position in the book’s history. It was the first English-language bridge to a major work of modern feminism, and its warm reception of Beauvoir’s intelligence helped bring the book to an American publisher. At the same time, the publisher’s demand for cuts and the translation’s treatment of philosophical terms constrained what English readers could encounter in that edition. Later translators’ efforts to restore the omitted text and clarify its conceptual vocabulary made those limits visible.

The contrast between the two translation projects also demonstrates that fidelity involves more than converting sentences into another language. In The Second Sex, paragraph length, syntax, punctuation, and philosophical terminology all contribute to the reasoning. Parshley’s version remains an important stage in the work’s English-language reception, while the subsequent complete translation sought to recover the voice and argumentative structure that abridgment and simplification had obscured.