The Paper's reporter Wang Qianni
Beauvoir's famous saying is "a woman is acquired", and Beauvoir himself is certainly no exception. In this biography that echoes her famous quote, "Becoming a Beauvoir," the author, Kate Kirkpatrick, a lecturer in philosophy and theology at the University of Oxford, presents her process of becoming a "Beauvoir."
Not only did she take the lead in using the newly exposed part of beauvoir's correspondence and early diaries, but she also used the intricately stitched text to tear through the stereotypes created by the mass media for Beauvoir, dispelling the shadow of Sartre's idol that had long hung over him.
Liu Haiping
Liu Haiping, the Chinese translator of "Becoming Beauvoir", is a doctor of cultural studies and gender studies from the University of Chinese in Hong Kong, with research interests in feminism and philosophical translation, and is currently a lecturer at the School of Foreign Chinese of Shenzhen University of Technology. Her master's thesis topic was a comparison between the translation of Beauvoir's "Second Sex" in Chinese mainland and Taiwan, and liu Haiping's three years of research experience also made Liu Haiping worthy of being a "research translator" and very competent in translating this biography.
"Kate Kirkpatrick used to specialize in Sartre, so her philosophical skills must have been very good, and then I read her introduction and I got a very clear sense that she was a beauvoir fan." Liu Haiping said that at that moment she decided to translate the biography well.
In Liu Haiping's view, this book is the best refutation of the "voyeuristic" beauvoir-style biography of Beauvoir, but it sincerely shows Beauvoir's strong and rich emotions, how she chooses open love, how to maintain an equal philosophical dialogue relationship with Sartre, how she practices her feminist philosophical view with her personal life... The Surging reporter and Liu Haiping had a conversation about Beauvoir.
"Become Beauvoir" book shadow
"Dispel Sartre's Shadow"
The Paper: When you were a master's student at CUHK, your thesis was also a study of the Chinese translation of Beauvoir's Second Sex.
Liu Haiping: Part of that research is the study of paratext, such as the cover of a book, the translator's preface, the introduction, the recommendation, and so on, to analyze what kind of purpose the publishing house launched the book in a specific era, what kind of book it wants to position it, and so on. At that time, my research subjects included all the translations of the Second Sex that I could find from Taiwan in 1972 to Chinese mainland in 2012, and there were more than twenty kinds of translations. It is rare for the same text to be translated and processed more than twenty times in the same feminist text that can be seen in China, and almost no other text can surpass this number.
When I was doing my master's thesis, I found that when "The Second Sex" was first translated in Taiwan, it used a Western nude woman as the cover, and later used some very abstract symbolic patterns. Chinese mainland was introduced, abstract paintings were also chosen as covers, but in the 1980s, you could feel that the publishing industry wanted to pursue an impactful visual effect, so it chose to use naked Western women as covers to attract people. For example, there is an anthology that is exaggerated, and the woman on its cover is like a midnight warbler, appearing next to the shadow silhouette of a man. You can hardly imagine that such a cover would be the cover of a philosophical work like The Second Sex, but it really is. So I thought that the book was not simply accepted as a feminist text, and some publishers inappropriately defined its selling point as "sex". Because it's called The Second Sex after all, it's written on the cover.
For the specific translated texts, my paper only selected three of the chapters, namely "Sex", "Marriage", and "Love", and then I compared only four of the most representative translations. The first is the first translation from the English translation to the Chinese in 1972, the earliest translation, translated by three women who graduated from National Taiwan University, namely Ouyang Zi, Yang Meihui and Yang Cuiping, who are classmates with Bai Xianyong and Li Oufan. The second is a translation of the Chinese mainland in 1998, also translated from the English translation into Chinese, and its translator is a man named Tao Tiezhu. The other two translations were translated from French to Chinese, the 2010 edition translated by Zheng Klu of Shanghai Translation Publishing House and the 2013 edition translated by Qiu Ruiluan of Taiwan Owl Publishing House. It happened that my second foreign student in college was French, so I was probably able to read the real original text of "The Second Sex". Although my French level is not so good, I can still understand it when I look at it. So I ended up comparing the original French and English texts with the translations of the four versions mentioned above.
Interestingly, of the four translations, two editions from Taiwan, 1972 and 2013, were translated by women, while the two editions from Chinese mainland, 1998 and 2010, were translated by men. I don't think the gender of the translator necessarily determines anything, and even when I first started doing this research, I almost wanted to rule out the gender influence of the translator himself. But the result is that the translators of the two female teams will translate the work more obviously to the feminist analytical position that Beauvoir originally wanted to express, and the male translator will translate it to make you feel a sense of alienation. This sense of alienation is simply a very strange translation cavity. Of course, this has a lot to do with whether the translators themselves have feminist tendencies, and at the same time, they also more or less state their personal views on Beauvoir's work in the preface, and whether they agree with it. The two translations Chinese mainland, especially Tao Tiezhu's, point out in the translator's preface that this work is only Western, only Beauvoir, and may have some reference significance for the theory of Chinese women's studies.
The Paper: Is there a particularly specific opportunity that prompted you to choose this topic as the research object of your master's thesis? Did you see the cover of a translation of The Second Sex, make you think it was incredible, and then you had the idea to do this research?
Liu Haiping: That was when I was studying at the Ma Translated MA at Hong Kong Baptist University, and I found a copy of The Second Sex in the library, which was translated by zoologist Parshley. When I was an undergraduate in Beijing, I didn't read the English version of The Second Sex, I only read Chinese, and it was the kind of deleted, I didn't have any impression of it, and the Chinese version of the book didn't make me feel remarkable.
But when I was studying for a master's degree, I was really surprised after reading the English version, and I felt that such a great book, why didn't the Chinese edition before let me feel that it was excellent? And to put it more superficially, I felt that the chapters she wrote about marriage and love were almost expressed in a philosophical way in a philosophical way, almost in a philosophical way, the words spoken by all the good and bad emotional experts that you can see at the moment. I felt at the time that those who write about love now don't have to write, and people have already explained this matter so deeply and thoroughly, but we may not have read it. So, at that time, I immediately made her my idol, like an academic idol, and I felt that her philosophy was a height that I would never be able to reach, and I could only study the problem of translation. You asked me to really study existentialism I can't do, from a philosophical level, you want to reach her height, or you want to use her way of writing to study problems, I think I can't do it, she is really too good.
Beauvoir in Love
The Paper: Yes, the book has a very positive and positive understanding of Beauvoir.
Liu Haiping: Yes, this is different from what I have read before, whether it is the autobiography of Beauvoir or the biography of various beauvoirs on the market. Those texts made me feel a strange "voyeurism." One of them, which I read a long time ago, was quite popular at the time, called "Beauvoir in Love." I think that book almost wants to be made into a movie, with a particularly strong sense of picture, and then it makes Beauvoir a special love brain — just write her as a woman who loses herself in love and then has no brain. But when I read the original English version of this book ("Become Beauvoir"), I felt that this author, her position was very correct, she explained Beauvoir's attitude to life. Beauvoir, in our very popular Chinese parlance, is using her life to engage in philosophy, to engage in philosophy with her own life, and she is very clear that she can live by.
She was just trying to find a philosophy that could guide her life, or that she could live that way, so I felt that the author of this biography— Kate Kirkpatrick — was right, and I agreed with her values. One of the conclusions of my PhD research at the time was that if the translator's values and views on the matter were closer to the original author, the closer you would translate something to the original text, and in a way the more faithful it was to the original text, that is, a better translation. So I felt that if I translated her biography, I wouldn't have to twist it or feel awkward, and many of her ideas were the same as mine. And I read her method of analysis, and I felt that the book was somewhere between academic and popular reading, neither too difficult nor too popular, not just a simple, voyeuristic biography, so I did not hesitate to take over the translation work.
The Paper: I don't think there is any trace of translation in this book, like you said, "If this author can write with Chinese, how will she write", I think you have achieved this effect.
You just said that Beauvoir is using her life to practice her philosophy, and I think so. I thought, there is a chapter about her and Olga and Bost, Olga and Bost, the two of them are lovers, but Olga did not know until his death that Beauvoir and Bost had a lover's relationship, and Beauvoir herself wondered, is it moral for me to do this? She had been thinking about it, which is why she thought that Sartre's existential philosophy lacked the moral aspect, and his moral concept was vague. Because the moral or non-moral questions she faced in her love life had always bothered her, she had been trying to explore this issue in the writing of "Female Guest".
Liu Haiping: Although the book is on the one hand chasing that trend, chasing the concept of Becoming that was very popular in previous years , Michelle Obama also produced a book "Becoming", and this concept can be traced back to Deleuze. But this book is also really a good representation of the process of Beauvoir's "Becoming", the process of Beauvoir's life and philosophy talking and colliding with each other, and finding answers between each other. And it is precisely because she shows the struggle of the writing object and the tension of the character that the more I feel that Beauvoir is a great person, but at the same time she is also a very ordinary person. In life, emotionally or in her career, in fact, she has a lot of ordinary people's struggles, but you can't see them in her great works, or these struggles have been processed by her into a philosophical expression, so you can't see them. This is also a big improvement after my own translation of this book, I was too mythical beauvoir.
At first I was amazed at her, thinking that she was my academic idol, but in the process of translating this book, when I came across some passages, such as Beauvoir, who would use very ugly words to describe other women, I realized that even the greatest person she may have some unbearable history and memories, to accept this imperfection. So when I turned it over, I told myself that it was a good thing not to deify a certain person too much, because she was a living person after all. Beauvoir said in her youth that she liked her two friends, Stepa and Maher, because she had had enough of the hypocrisy of the saints, and "only Mae and Stepa could do this to me." They treated me like a flesh-and-blood, spiritual and lustful person" (a creature of the earth). She wants to be treated as a living, real person with spirit and flesh, and I think that's one of the things that I've learned a lot from this book.
Stills from the movie "Lovers of the Flower God Cafe"
The Paper: So the starting point for our reading is not the same. Before you came into contact with this biography, Beauvoir was an academic icon in your heart, but I hadn't studied her, and she was in my understanding the feeling in the movie "Lovers of the Cafe de la Flora". Of course, many people criticized the film, saying that it made the great feminist mentor a love brain.
Liu Haiping: Her emotions are very warm, which will leave a deep impression on us, but these things are just some fragments of her life, and these fragments cannot be used to evaluate Beauvoir as a whole. And I don't think we ever say that a male philosopher or writer is "in love with a brain," and even if he were, he might only be called "bending over for beauty" or something. And when we use the term "love brain" to describe women, it appears directly as a very negative evaluation. But in my understanding, no matter what gender a person is, he may have lived very passionately for feelings at a certain stage and at a certain point in time.
And I think it's interesting that now we call it an open relationship, but they were called Ménage à Trois at the time, which was a triangular relationship. In fact, at the beginning, Beauvoir was not as willing to enter such a relationship as Sartre, because Sartre himself was a man after all, he did not have so many concerns, this is really only good for him and there is almost no harm.
But Beauvoir was very honest with herself, and she realized that although at first she would be jealous and jealous, then when she was involved with Sartre or a certain man, she would also like other men, and she would be very honest with herself. Conversely, when the male companion wants Beauvoir to be loyal to him, she will protest, and she wonders why women must live according to the rules of society for you, such as you have to be exclusive. I think when Beauvoir finds out that she may just instinctively not want to have just one relationship, but wants to have multiple possibilities, she can affirm her desires, face this desire, and find a way of life that allows her desires to go on, which I think is already very brave.
Later, she would question her male companions, such as the married Maher, who was only a lover to him, but he in turn demanded that Beauvoir must have only one lover, and Beauvoir was very dissatisfied with this.
Yes, Beauvoir was at some stage consistent with what we now call the "love brain", such as when she was later with Algren in the United States, she was physically, as if she had found a new world, and there may be many such encounters in a person's life, especially for someone like her who did not choose the traditional marriage system of monogamy. She didn't say who she hurt, maybe later because she didn't disclose her relationship with Bost, hurt Olga, but I think most of the time she practiced her own love and sexual desires with the premise of not hurting others, and we don't have to criticize her.
Inside page of Becoming Beauvoir
The Paper: In addition, this biography has a very superior place, that is, this author actually knows Sartre very well, is an expert in the study of Sartre, and in this biography, it can be seen that her research experience in this regard can be seen.
Liu Haiping: And she used some new materials. At the beginning of the book, as well as in the promotion of the book, it is mentioned that the author dug up the letters of Beauvoir and Claude Langtzmann, and I think the importance of this part of the information is that it can finally prove that Sartre is not so important to Beauvoir. Because it provides one of the most direct examples. In French, the title Vous is an honorific with a slight sense of distance, while Tu is a very intimate title. Beauvoir only used Tu for Lanzmann. In Beauvoir's last book, The Farewell Ceremony, which Beauvoir wrote to Sartre, all of her titles for Sartre were translated as "you" when she Chinese translated, and I did not read the original French, but I guess I used Vous. The author also mentioned that there is actually a lot of new material, almost all of which is in French, and there is no English translation, so researchers have not paid enough attention to them. Therefore, the author quickly wrote this biography after getting this part of the information, and she also wanted to further prove that Sartre was not so important in Beauvoir's life.
Is Beauvoir "misogynistic"?
The Paper: Longzmann is a very talented director. After Sartre's death, Beauvoir was depressed for a while, but at the time, Lanzmann was making the movie "Havoc", so he kept asking Beauvoir to watch him cut the film, hoping to help Beauvoir get through the difficulties in this way. It can also be felt from this incident that For Beauvoir, Longsman is also a person who can support her when she is very depressed, and should be a very important person for her.
We have just spoken of this book to clarify a point, proving that Sartre is not so important in Beauvoir's life, but there are still many people who feel that Sartre is important and that Beauvoir is attached to Sartre. What common misconception do you think there is about Beauvoir?
Liu Haiping: Another point that surprised me is that this biography believes that the idea for the book "Existence and Nothingness" was actually born before Beauvoir, and this book is almost arguably Sartre's most representative work, the work that made him world-famous.
Beauvoir was interviewed by Radio-Canada in 1967
The Paper: It's about looking from the inside out and looking at it from the outside in, this set of very important concepts.
Liu Haiping: Yes, of course, now we can't easily talk about plagiarism, we can't talk about such exaggeration, but there was a certain period of time, because Sartre was particularly busy, and even Beauvoir directly helped him write articles, but when it was published, it was Sartre's name. And I think Sartre has a more or less desire to pursue fame and fortune, he wants to be popular, and after he became popular, he began to want to engage in politics, he is a very typical kind of man who wants to build his reputation. Beauvoir didn't seem to care so much about fame, and throughout her life she felt like she wanted to reject some of the bigger titles like "philosopher." In fact, the book doesn't come to a conclusion on this issue, and I think that's a point that the author did better. It is she who shows the complexity of these things, these character relationships, or the state of mind of the characters, without simply making any conclusive conclusions. For example, the idea of "Existence in Nothingness" was first proposed by Beauvoir, but later sent by Sartre and so on.
The Paper: Or at least it arose in their conversations, and both of them may not be able to tell who made the original point of view, because they have often had this kind of philosophical conversation since they met. The feeling I felt after reading this biography was that Beauvoir had made such a great contribution to the final formation of the theory in Existence in Nothingness, and it is not too much to say that it was the second author.
Liu Haiping: In fact, the biographer Kate, she is also very envious of Beauvoir, or envy Sartre, it is rare to have such a partner, on the intellectual level, on the spiritual level, to be able to talk to him all the time. Most people can't possibly have such a partner. So the creation of the two of them may be a very organic combination of the process, there is no way to separate them. But the previous misconception was that we always thought of Sartre as a mentor-like figure, condescending to point out Beauvoir, giving her a lot of inspiration and so on, but in fact the two of them should be a close-knit relationship, giving and inspiring each other, and Sartre did not dominate in it.
The Paper: Yes, intellectually and intellectually, they are actually equal, and they inspire and inspire each other. Speaking of love, do you think their love is truly equal and reciprocal? The book actually gives a new perspective, in beauvoir's open letter to her later lover, she wrote about her relationship with Sartre, arguing that what was really lacking was not sex, but the reciprocal return of love. But she later seems to have described this mutual love, so how should we come to this conclusion?
Liu Haiping: I myself was also very interested in the relationship between the two of them and the topic of what is called equal and reciprocal love. Let me first clarify that the so-called equal and reciprocal love, I think, can only be an ideal, a state that can be constantly pursued but never achieved.
In fact, after Beauvoir, there was a particularly famous sociologist in Britain named Anthony Giddens, who also proposed a similar concept, he called pure love. I think this concept can only be regarded as an ideal state, because its realization requires not only the interaction and efforts of both sides of the relationship, but also the need to change the macro structure of the whole society, and the most important of which is to change the concept of gender. If we can't make macro changes, but only through the efforts of both sides, try to fight macro structural problems with tiny individuals, this is difficult to achieve.
So I think Beauvoir and Sartre are already very good role models, they are using individual efforts to fight structural inequality, to pursue an equal and reciprocal relationship. But at the same time I don't think the two of them have achieved the kind of reciprocal feedback that Beauvoir wants, especially when it comes to sex. Also, Beauvoir has said many times that she is actually a very emotional person, and she wants the other party to understand, listen and respond to her emotions, but Sartre can't do it. This cannot be done, not that he is willing to do so, but that he may not have the ears to listen to this emotion.
The Paper: Sartre also has no ability to listen.
Liu Haiping: Yes, so this directly caused their "inappropriateness", Beauvoir has such delicate, so strong emotions, and Sartre scoffed at this, he felt that she should not have these emotions, or you should use these emotions to do philosophical creation. I understand this feeling very well, men often have this kind of discrimination against emotions, think there is something to make a fuss about, so when I read those passages, I could especially understand the pain in Beauvoir's heart. On the intellectual level, the spiritual level, the philosophical level, they are very good dialogue partners, but emotionally, I think their love is likely to end in youth, followed by a life partner, and there is not much love.
Beauvoir and Sartre Burial Place, Montparnasse Cemetery, Paris, France.
The Paper: There are some voices that accuse Beauvoir of having misogynistic tendencies, and their argument is that Beauvoir once openly said that I am not a philosopher, and then these people think that you have belittled yourself, and that you, as a representative of feminism, have a misogynistic tendency yourself. This is also clarified in the book.
Liu Haiping: There is actually a lot of talk in the book about this issue, that is, Beauvoir is very worried about making himself a person with a bigger reputation than Sartre. Because she has emphasized that women's sexual attraction and your intellectual achievements are in conflict. So I think she probably doesn't want to lose the feminine charm of her personal life for the sake of fame. So I feel like the biographer is saying that Beauvoir is saying that she's not a philosopher, and that this may be just one of her tactics.
When she was alive, she didn't want to sacrifice those parts of her personal life for fame, so her low-key statement may have a certain sense of self-protection. And then there's the question about misogyny. I think for Beauvoir, she herself wrote that when she was a child, she never felt that her gender had caused her any problems. On the one hand, this may be because she, as the eldest daughter in the family, is more favored by her parents, and on the other hand, it may be because she has always been as good as her male classmates in school, or even better than male classmates. For example, in the exam she and Sartre took, Sartre was the second exam, and she was three years younger than Sartre, but the real result was said to be Sartre second, Beauvoir first, but the exam jury felt that it could not give women first, so they reversed their names.
I can understand what Beauvoir said, although she herself came from a declining aristocratic family, she at least had no worries about food and clothing, and then the school she went to from childhood to adulthood was very good, and she was never discriminated against in it, and even very good, so she did not experience the disadvantages of too much female gender. So I think for someone like her who hasn't experienced the life experience of ordinary women, you can't say that she is misogynistic or not.
The Paper: She sympathizes with her good friend Zaza's experience, which should be the source of her personal experience of writing "The Second Sex" and the opportunity for her to start thinking about the situation of women. In addition, the sentence you just mentioned is also what I particularly like in this book, that is, if women pursue their own achievements, they are likely to lose their charm to men, and she has already made this statement very thorough in that era. She wrote: "Professional women often feel inferior to other women because they feel that they lack attractiveness, they are not sensitive enough, that is, they lack femininity. In contrast, men never have to sacrifice their success for masculinity, nor do they have to give up personal achievements in order to feel comfortable, men's professional success has never caused personal losses, only women are tormented and tortured by this contradiction, they either have to give up part of their personality, or they have to give up the charm of attracting men, but why to achieve success to pay such a high price. ”
Liu Haiping: Xu Zidong in "Walking the World" said that being a father and being a successful man are completely in the same vein and do not conflict with each other. If you're a successful man, you're probably already a half-successful father, but being a successful mother and being a successful woman is a complete conflict. Often the more successful women are, the more failed moms, if you are a good mom, it is difficult for you to become a successful woman in your career, and this thing has limited women from the beginning. So I think Beauvoir is a very smart person, and when the two of them are apart because of their work, Sartre actually suggested that it was better to get married, because according to the policy of the state, they would be assigned to schools in close proximity. But Beauvoir felt that marriage would increase a person's moral obligations, and later she said that if she had children, her career would not be able to achieve much, so I think she was very clear that she wanted to achieve something more in her career than in her personal life.
The Paper: On page 273, Beauvoir points out that in a society that transforms women into others, men are in a favorable position, not only because of the benefits they gain, but also because of men's inner feelings, from childhood, they can freely pursue and enjoy their careers, and no one will ever tell them that the career they want to pursue will conflict with their happiness as lovers, husbands and fathers, and their success will never reduce their possibility of being loved. But for women, for the sake of femininity, she must give up what Beauvoir calls subjectivity, that is, she cannot have an ideal vision of her own life, and she cannot pursue the career she wants to achieve at will, because all this is considered to be uninsemposed, which puts women in a lose-lose situation, and being herself means becoming unworthy of being loved. And if you want to get love, you have to give up on yourself. Sartre once wrote that as human beings we are destined to be free. And Beauvoir writes here that as women, we are destined to feel divided, destined to be the subject of division. I thought it was too well written.
Liu Haiping: So I highly recommend that you look at the second half of "The Second Sex", that is, the part of "The Experience of Life". The first part is more difficult to understand, of course, it is better to look directly at the English translation, or even the original French.
Beauvoir also has a very interesting point. In Beauvoir's time, in addition to her, many French philosophers and thinkers had a curiosity and affection for China, especially after Beauvoir and Sartre came to China. Beauvoir's The Long March is based on her reflections on a trip to China in 1955, which made her rethink, "I saw the broad masses of China shattering my overall view of the Western world; at that time, the Long March, was the truth of the world, and the comfort of our Westerners was only a limited privilege." Beauvoir hopes that her personal experiences, what she has seen and what she has heard and what she has talked about will allow others to see that Chinese is "working to build a human world."
Editor-in-Charge: Chen Shihuai