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by Ludwig Wittgenstein (Author), Marjorie Perloff (Translator)
During the pandemic, Marjorie Perloff, one of our foremost scholars of global literature, found her mind ineluctably drawn to the profound commentary on life and death in the wartime diaries of eminent philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951). Upon learning that these notebooks, which richly contextualize the early stages of his magnum opus, the Tractatus-Logico-Philosophicus, had never before been published in English, the Viennese-born Perloff determinedly set about translating them. Beginning with the anxious summer of 1914, this historic, en-face edition presents the first-person recollections of a foot soldier in the Austrian Army, fresh from his days as a philosophy student at Cambridge, who must grapple with the hazing of his fellow soldiers, the stirrings of a forbidden sexuality, and the formation of an explosive analytical philosophy that seemed to draw meaning from his endless brushes with death. Much like Tolstoy's The Gospel in Brief, Private Notebooks takes us on a personal journey to discovery as it augments our knowledge of Wittgenstein himself.
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"This is a vivid and moving account of the journey of a soul in a dark time, a time in which Wittgenstein was also testing out the limits of what could be said about our place in the world. Marjorie Perloff has done us a great service in making this text available."
--Colm Tóibín, author of The Master
"Marjorie Perloff brings a poet's rather than a scholar's sensibility to her translation. . . . Here we see the man between the lines of the Tractatus, agonizing over personal and logical difficulties at the same time. Perloff's edition will be accessible to amateur fans of Wittgenstein and his work, as well as useful to students and scholars."
--James C. Klagge, author of Tractatus in Context
"Long neglected, this remarkable work has at long last reached the English-speaking public in a translation . . . by the doyenne of American modern poetry criticism, Marjorie Perloff, in a labor of love that unites sensitivity to aesthetic and cultural values with philosophical depth. It is essential reading."
--Allan Janik, philosopher and coauthor of Wittgenstein's Vienna
"Marjorie Perloff has offered us a window through which we might see the enigmatic Wittgenstein with justified compassion and empathy. This is a marvelous translation that truly adds to our knowledge of a much studied and phenomenally influential thinker."
--Percival Everett, author of I Am Not Sidney Poitier
