Talk:Simone de Beauvoir

This is the talk page for discussing improvements to the Simone de Beauvoir page.
Please sign and date your posts using four tildes (~~~~). New discussion topics go at the bottom of the page; click here to start a new topic. New to Wikiquote? Welcome! Frequently asked questions. This is not a forum for general discussion about the page's subject.	Talk page guidelines Be polite Assume good faith No personal attacks Don't bite the newcomers!

---

Not born a woman

The quote here says,

• On ne naît pas femme: on le devient.
     • One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.

If this is an excerpt from an official translation, I must say it's awkward sounding ("One is not born"? Oh, so we get here by transporter beam maybe? "Born, but rather becomes..." Wh-huh? Oh, I see; we hit woman and then have to pop everything off the stack back to not and reparse, while distributing woman into the first clause; sure, no problem...") and it varies too much from the original. It ought to say this:

One is not born a woman, one becomes one.

I googled the latter, and there are plenty of references for it that way. I don't know if Wikiquote is required to choose a translation issued in book length, or can opt for another one, but the current version is leaves a lot to be desired. Mathglot (talk) 08:34, 23 May 2018 (UTC)

Alex Miller's epigraph

"We cannot arbitrarily invent projects for ourselves: they have to be written in the past as requirements."

This was used as an epigraph to Alex Miller's 2005 novel Prochownik's Dream, and it gets quoted a few times by others. But my searching has failed to find Beauvoir's original source. -- JackofOz (talk) 21:19, 13 October 2024 (UTC)