We are saddened to announce the death of our beloved author, informal advisor, and friend, Marjorie Perloff on March 24, 2024. She was 92. A world renowned scholar, admired for her dissection of complex texts and poems through precise close reading, Perloff leaves behind an immense body of work, including over a dozen books, and a legacy in the many organizations and social circles she participated in with verve.
Several university presses released tributes to Perloff, including Stanford University, where she spent over a decade teaching and mentoring students on critical approaches to experimental and modern poetry. The University of Chicago and University of Minnesota also published commemorative pieces, noting Perloff’s enumerable impact on literary scholars at their respective institutions. Alongside these, the New York Times published a wonderful tribute detailing her family history and prolific career.
Born into a distinguished Jewish family in Vienna on September 28, 1931, Marjorie Perloff was originally named Gabriele Mintz. Her family fled Vienna just two days after the Nazi annexation of Austria on March 15, 1938, and embarked on a journey to America, which she documented in her memoir The Vienna Paradox (New Directions, 2003). At a young age, she changed her name to Marjorie, and assumed the last name Perloff after marrying Joseph Perloff (1924–2014), a doctor and the founding director of the UCLA Congenital Heart Disease Center who shared her love for teaching. Perloff’s emigrant status informed many of her literary tastes – she was fluent in her native German, her adopted English as well as regularly traveling to international conferences in Europe, China, and Brazil, and having her books translated into Portuguese, Spanish, Slovenian, German, and French.
After Perloff took emeritus status in 2001, she continued writing, contributing essays and pieces of literary criticism with countless outlets including The Los Angeles Review of Books, Boston Review and The Times Literary Supplement. Her CV itself runs around seventy pages.
She was never far, however, from her Viennese roots. In 2018 for the anniversary of the World War I Armistice, DoppelHouse published an artbook about Deborah Sengl and Karl Kraus’s The Last Days of Mankind, with the lead essay by Perloff (based on comments in her 2014 lecture at The Getty). Amidst the COVID pandemic, she undertook the task of translating Wittgenstein’s covertly written notebooks from World War I into English. Her rendition, titled Private Notebooks: 1914–1916, was published in 2022 (Liveright) to great acclaim. Her decades-long commitment to Wittgenstein culminated in a triad of projects. The former already mentioned, the copublished DoppelHouse and Wittgenstein Institute’s 2023 book of essays titled the Tractatus Odyssey, and Damion Searls’s translation of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (Liveright, 2024), for which she wrote the introduction. We are honored to have worked with Marjorie and extend our deep condolences to her daughters and sons-in-law, grandchildren, nephew, dear friends, and colleagues. Her peripatetic interests, non-elitist attitude, and fierce wit and intelligence propelled her until the end. She will remain a force of gravity, drawing people from the past and future together in our common humanity.
