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38 LITERATÛRZINÂTNE, FOLKLORISTIKA, MÂKSLA
exception to smooth the sections that would have remained uneven after heavy surgery
but, rather, as a rule. Paragraphs are blended at will which, in addition to violating
the original, also makes the text more difficult to follow. Again, it is not the
invisible editors who take the blame but the author. Also, the dubious editorial
practices cannot be explained away by space limits—other books in the same series,
often bulkier than Beauvoir’s, have not suffered a similar fate.
Since such cutting and blending is so frequent, one is led to suspect that the
translation has been done not from the French original, as the title page claims, but
from an abridged version in some other language. 12 The next stage in the current
project will involve a close study of the Finnish translation as a possible source of
“inspiration”. As Marek Tamm has suggested, the translators and editors have lacked
respect for both the author and the reader. 13 That is, they have attempted to do the
thinking and selecting for the reader and limited their freedom of interpretation, blocking
out certain choices and fronting others. Damage to the author is more than clear.
A feature that catches the eye all through the text is the disrespectful handling of
the references to source material. The copious notes of the original have been
squeezed to 4.5 pages in the Estonian translation. What more, the references have
been deleted rather arbitrarily—sometimes references are missing even from the text
that has not been omitted. Again, no explanation has been given. Since the book was
published in a philosophy series the primary audience of which is not the TV–dazed
everyman with a limited attention span, it is odd that the staple of academic literature
has been sacrificed without regret. Aristotle and Freud, also published in the same
series around the same time, have not suffered the same fate—comparable in length,
they are supplied with ample commentaries as well as a bibliography. In the case of
Beauvoir, the readers have also been denied access to the material that informed
Beauvoir. Dated or not, the references are indispensable in appreciating the line of
reasoning of the author and her dialogue with the thinkers of the past and her contemporaries.
One can only speculate about whether the reason for such manhandling
is the relegation of Beauvoir into the lower tiers of contemporary thought and a consequent
disregard for her intellectual apparatus.
This omission is made even more glaring by the fact that the translation has systematically
erased references throughout the text. Thus we lose much of de
Beauvoir’s support material—philosophers like Merleau–Ponty, Levinas, Heidegger,
even Sartre, historical figures from all time periods, anthropological examples, references
to natural sciences. Again, the only rational explanation could be the editors’
desire to make the reading easier. Yet, consciously or unconsciously, the translation
actually succeeds in watering down Beauvoir’s thought and reducing her credibility
as an academic. (This was one of the first features that bothered me on my first reading
of the Estonian text and led me to criticize her for sloppy arguments that might
not have made it through freshman course in academic writing.) Also, the omissions
do not result in a text that is easier to consume—instead, the lack of examples, parallels
and illustrations makes the argumentation hard to follow and many passages remain
abstruse or even demagogic.
The indiscriminate editing and the omission of references are visible all through
the book. However, there are several chapters that are omitted in full. The following