Retranslating, repackaging, and recontextualizing Simone de Beauvoir’s Le deuxième sexe in the Turkish context with an invisible feminist translator

ABSTRACT

This article analyzes the Turkish retranslation of Beauvoir’s Le deuxième sexe, translated by Gülnur Acar Savran and published by Koç University Press in 2019, with a focus on the receiving cultural context. The study aims to problematize the fact that the female translator of this ‘feminist retranslation’ is often overlooked. To examine the publisher’s motivations for retranslating this work, the paratextual elements are compared to the previous translation. The previous translation was published in three volumes, each with a different subtitle inspired by the second volume of the original text. Additionally, the use of photographs of women on the front covers and the emphasis on the scandalous nature of the text on the back covers did not promote its feminist content. The main argument is that the new translation reintroduces the source text as a feminist classic to a new readership in Türkiye, with the added benefit of the translator and publisher’s ideological and academic background, without giving due credit to the translator. My analysis on the paratextual level and the current discussion about Acar Savran's invisibility as a retranslator have led me to problematize the issue within feminist translation studies, referring to the double invisibility of women as translators.

KEYWORDS:

• Paratext
• retranslation
• Beauvoir
• Le deuxième sexe
• gender and translation
• feminist translation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Regarding the number of retranslations, I did not consider the first unabridged translation of Le deuxième sexe by Bertan Onaran or the three initial translations of the work as retranslations. This is because the four initial translations are partial translations of the work, each covering only approximately 15% of the whole text.

2 In 2019, the feminist website ÇatlakZemin criticized the packaging of the earlier translation for being published haphazardly in three volumes with irrelevant covers. This resembles the only criticism the former publisher had received from Turkish Marxist feminists on a few occasions at book fairs in the 1980s (Postalcıoğlu, 2016, p. 107).

3 In the previous translation, significant omissions were made in the second part of the first volume regarding women’s history.

4 I scanned all issues published between January 2019 and November 2023 of Kitap-lık and Varlık, two of the most prominent Turkish journals of literature. I also conducted a search in October 2023 on K24 Kitap, a prominent Turkish online cultural journal that is specialized in books and literature (https://www.k24kitap.org/), using the keyword ‘İkinci Cinsiyet Simone de Beauvoir’. I also searched the five most popular feminist digital platforms using the same keyword: ÇatlakZemin (https://catlakzemin.com/), 5Harfliler (https://www.5harfliler.com/), Dijital Topuklar (https://dijitaltopuklar.com/), feminist bellek (https://feministbellek.org/), and Reçel Blog (http://recel-blog.com/page/2/). Finally, I did a search on Google using the same keyword.

5 In an interview from 2014, Kurtuluş Kayalı, a renowned Turkish professor specializing in the history of the Turkish intellectual world in the Republican and modern periods, made a remark about Turkish intellectuals in social sciences during the 1960s. He stated that almost all of them, including the socialist ones, would be considered conservative, misogynistic, and homophobic by today’s standards (Dansuk, 2014, p. 24). Although this is a strong critique of the intellectuals of the time, it provides insight into the significant impact of the patriarchal order on the mindset of the Turkish intelligentsia in the 1960s. Therefore, promoting a feminist woman writer in such a context may present challenges from the outset.

6 It is worth noting, however, that Onaran received the TDK (Turkish Language Association) translation prize in 1972 for his translation of Beauvoir’s L’invitée.

7 A textual analysis, which is not within the scope of this paper, can also be used to examine the way in which the textual material corresponds to the paratexts.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ayşenaz Cengiz

Ayşenaz Cengiz completed her PhD at the Universitat Rovira i Virgili. She holds a BA and an MA in Translation Studies from the Department of Translation Studies, Boğaziçi University, Istanbul. She is a faculty member and teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in the Department of Translation and Interpreting Studies at Boğaziçi University. Her research interests lie in the areas of feminist translation theories, traveling theories through translation, and paratexts and translation. Her dissertation was entitled ‘Simone de Beauvoir in Turkey: (Her)story of a Translational Journey’ and directed by Michaela Wolf.