The London Review of Books has a terrific review by Toril Moi of the new translation of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. Connoisseurs of these matters (of whom I am, coincidentally, one, having once been married to someone who wrote an M.Phil dissertation on Beauvoir’s ‘presentation of self’ in The Second Sex) will know that the book has an interesting translation history. The original English version (by H.M. Parshley) was lively and readable, but had been heavily abridged by its publisher. Many years later, after much fuss, the publishers eventually commissioned a new translation. In an extensive review, Toril Moi leaves it for dead. In summary:

After taking a close look at the whole book, I found three fundamental and pervasive problems: a mishandling of key terms for gender and sexuality, an inconsistent use of tenses, and the mangling of syntax, sentence structure and punctuation.

Moi has some delicious examples of the crassness of the new translation. Here’s one:

Even the most famous sentence in The Second Sex is affected. Parshley translated ‘On ne naît pas femme: on le devient’ as ‘One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.’ Borde and Malovany-Chevallier write: ‘One is not born, but rather becomes, woman.’ This is an elementary grammatical mistake. French does not use the indefinite article after être (‘be’) and devenir (‘become’), but no such rule exists in English. (Comment devenir traducteur? must be translated as ‘How to become a translator?’) This error makes Beauvoir sound as if she were committed to a theory of women’s difference. But Beauvoir’s point isn’t that a baby girl grows up to become woman; she becomes a woman, one among many, and in no way the incarnation of Woman, a concept Beauvoir discards as a patriarchal ‘myth’ in the first part of her book. ‘I am woman hear me roar’ has no place in Beauvoir’s feminism.

And another:

The book is marred by unidiomatic or unintelligible phrases and clueless syntax; by expressions such as ‘the forger being’, ‘man’s work equal’, ‘the adulteress wife’, and ‘leisure in château life’; and formulations such as ‘because since woman is certainly to a large extent man’s invention’, ‘a condition unique to France is that of the unmarried woman’, ‘alone she does not succeed in separating herself in reality’, ‘this uncoupling can occur in a maternal form.’

And this:

A character in Balzac’s Letters of Two Brides is made to kill her husband ‘in a fit of passion’, when what she really does is kill him ‘par l’excès de sa passion’ (‘by her excessive passion’). In the chapter on ‘The Married Woman’, Beauvoir quotes the famous line from Balzac’s Physiologie du mariage: ‘Ne commencez jamais le mariage par un viol’ (‘Never begin marriage by a rape’). Borde and Malovany-Chevallier write: ‘Do not begin marriage by a violation of law.’

At one point, Beauvoir discusses Hegel’s analysis of sex. In the new translation, a brief quotation from The Philosophy of Nature ends with the puzzling claim: ‘This is mates coupling.’ Mates coupling? What does Hegel mean? It turns out that in Beauvoir’s French version, Hegel says, ‘C’est l’accouplement’; A.V. Miller’s translation of The Philosophy of Nature uses the obvious term, ‘copulation’.

And my favourite:

In a discussion of male sexuality, Beauvoir points out that men can get pleasure from just about any woman. As evidence she mentions ‘la prospérité de certaines “maisons d’abattage”’, which Borde and Malovany-Chevallier translate as ‘the success of certain “slaughter-houses”’. But for a prostitute, faire de l’abattage is to get through customers quickly; as the context makes abundantly clear, a maison d’abattage is not an abattoir, but a brothel specialising in a quick turnover.

Overall, it looks as though the new translation is, linguisticall speaking, a car-crash. And Moi’s piece provides a delicious confirmation of the worth of serious journals like the LRB.

Fascinating anecdote in The Online Photographer blog about an encounter with Henri Cartier-Bresson.

I had expected to encounter the gentle soul of a poet. Instead, the quirky man to whom I was introduced was edgier than I could ever have imagined, possessed of a sharply caustic intellect that, I realize in retrospect, might actually have been calculated to put people off—or perhaps just people like me. He was, I’d been told, an aristocrat. He talked of his growing frustration with (or maybe it was disdain for) photography, and his concomitant need to return to his roots: drawing and painting, the few examples of which I’d seen had left me cold, left me wondering how a great master in one field would fail so completely to recognize his mediocrity in another. But no matter. If Henri Cartier-Bresson chose to be full of himself, I was sure he’d earned the right. Genius is as genius does.

At one point, a young man with a Nikon F appeared at the open door. I paid him little mind; at ICP, one regularly encountered young people carrying cameras, all eagerly shooting each other’s nooks and crannies as they earnestly went about learning how to make incisive pictures. But this fellow was different; he seemed barely out of his teens—if indeed he was—and he appeared to be genuinely starstruck. It is not often one gets to meet one’s true-life hero in the flesh.

“Monsieur Cartier-Bresson,” the young man exclaimed in what sounded like his best prep-school French as he brought his Nikon to his eye, moved in and squeezed off a series of exposures with, I think, a 105mm lens. At the last ka-thunk of the mirror, Cartier-Bresson sprung to his feet, literally sprung as if his wiry body had been coiled tight, just waiting for a reason to release itself.

“You must not photograph me!” he shrieked, his English suddenly crystal-clear. “No one is allowed to photograph me! Everyone must know that…”

The kid apologised and withdrew, but C-B pursued him.

Such a show of respect was apparently too little, too late for Cartier-Bresson, whose face by now was beet-red. He chased the young man out the doorway into into a corridor, screaming at the top of his lungs that without his cherished cloak of anonymity he could not continue to go unnoticed among the people of the world. Encumbered by fame and celebrity, how could he photograph freely? He would be recognized at every turn.

My final mental image of the sad turn of events is of a raging Frenchman having a full-out tantrum, his arms waving, his charged body literally jumping up and down, his intense eyes suddenly turned wild, right in the face of this by-now completely humiliated and defenseless young man who, at first backed against a wall, now slid down to the floor, his body sobbing, his trembling hand reaching out, if memory serves, to offer what I took to be a partially exposed roll of film as penance.

I could not help but reflect on all those unsuspecting individuals whose identities, whose very souls, had been captured, dissected even, by Henri Cartier-Bresson’s revealing eye.

I think that’s unnecessarily generous. Cartier-Bresson made a handsome living, and established a great artistic reputation, mainly by photographing people without their permission — in many cases immortalising their fallibility. Think, for example, of those guys he photographed peeing against a wall. Or the couples picnicking by the banks of the Marne. Much though I love his work, if he’d tried that hysterical act on me I’m afraid I’d have been tempted to tell him to go f*** himself. And photographed him as he did so.