The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir, translated by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier

(Knopf, 800 pages, $40)

The foundational work of modern feminism has had a surprisingly shabby publishing history, said Tracy Clark-Flory in Salon.com. Though Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex influenced generations of feminist thinkers in America, the only translation available in English for decades was a “butchered” version dashed off by a male zoologist a few years after the book’s 1949 debut. Finally, a complete new translation has been published. But “whether it is improved is up for debate.” This edition’s publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, entrusted the task to two American women, living in France, whose most salient experience is translating cookbooks. Their work mangles the original’s admittedly complicated syntax, and often their efforts “profoundly alter the content of Beauvoir’s arguments.”

But the original was a “wild and unruly masterpiece,” and the new translation captures that spirit, said Katie Roiphe in Slate.com. Beauvoir wanted to explore all the forces that shaped a woman’s identity, and she was a bold thinker open to “the contradictions, the nuances, the million tiny ambivalences and ambiguities of intimate life.” The “brilliantly” messy book that she produced refuses cliché, starting from its first sentence: “I hesitated a long time before writing a book on woman,” Beauvoir wrote. “The subject is irritating, especially for women.”

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Unfortunately, no translation can iron out the flaws in Beauvoir’s own thinking, said Francine du Plessix Gray in The New York Times. Some of the book’s bellicosity can be attributed to how bad conditions were for women in 1949, but “Beauvoir’s truly paranoid hostility toward the institutions of marriage and motherhood is so extreme as to be occasionally hilarious.” For a woman who had many lovers, she’s oddly gloomy about sex itself. Still, her book’s “many astute insights” remain applicable today. Beauvoir believed humanity would reach its potential only when women shook off culturally imposed limitations. “No one has more eloquently, irately challenged us” to effect that revolution.