It is a paradox that Wittgenstein, who held that "The limits of language are the limits of my world" and that "philosophy can really be written only as a form of poetry," has been (and can readily be) widely translated, indeed, is known to most of us in English-language translation of the original German, even as his poetic contemporaries like Rilke or Eliot remain resistant to even the best efforts to "convey" their meanings and poetic effects.  What aspects of poetic language are and are not translatable?  This paper investigates the issue of what Duchamp called the "infrathin" in language.

Marjorie Perloff's most recent books are Wittgenstein's Ladder: Poetic Language and the Strangeness of the Ordinary (1996), Poetry On & Off the Page (1998), and, just published, 21st-Century Modernism: The "New" Poetics (Blackwell, 2002).  She is Sadie Dernham Patek Professor of Humanities Emerita at Stanford University.

This event is cosponsored by the UCSB Interdisciplinary Humanities Center Modernist Studies Research Focus Group, Comparative Literature Program, Department of French & Italian, Department of the History of Art and Architecture, Department of English, and Interdisciplinary Humanities Center.