The actual mystery is why his identify happens in this index. But Samivel, whose actual name was Paul Gayet-Tancrède, never used any identify except Samivel in anything he ever created. I’d doubt that many people, including Beauvoir, had a clue as to his real identify. Simone de Beauvoir, shows journey souvenirs that line her museum-like condo, then takes us onto the Paris streets to indicate us her birthplace, childhood school, earlier apartments and cafes where she and Sartre met with pals and colleagues. The translators claim that their purpose was to bring ‘into English the closest model attainable of Simone de Beauvoir’s voice, expression and mind’. As different translators do, we needed to make selections primarily based on the interpretation of the French textual content and on principles of translation: in this case, the choices were made to convey Simone de Beauvoir’s vocabulary, voice, model, context and period. We’re the translators of the first complete English-language version of Le Deuxième Sexe, reviewed by Toril Moi (LRB, 11 February). We knew about the stress put on the publishers to set up a board of consulting editors and to show the translation into an annotated edition – all to no avail.
