2010 Honourable Mention from the Alcuin Society for Excellence in Book Design in Canada for Poetry, awarded to Mark Goldstein

Tracelanguag: a Shared Breath is a serial poem made up of six cycles all of which correspond with Paul Celan’s 1967 book of poetry, Atemwende. Here, his work is re-inscribed via a transmutation of word material found or developed from within the original text. These poems are elegiac in nature. A language of landscape figures prominently in the work, one where the ‘trace’ of Tracelanguage: a Shared Breath gauges Celan’s music amid the rubble of its German, post Shoa.

Mark Goldstein is a Toronto writer. In 2010, he inaugurated the Toronto New School of Writing with his 12-week seminar on Transtranslation. While lecturing at EHESS Paris last year, he launched Tracelanguage: A Shared Breath, his second title with BookThug, a transtranslation of poet Paul Celan’s seminal work, “Atemwende.” BookThug published his first poetry collection in 2008, After Rilke, a set of letters in homage to late American poet Jack Spicer and a series of homophonic translations based on Rilke’s “The Voices.” From 1989 to 1999, he played drums in the indie rock band By Divine Right, whose members included Broken Social Scene’s Brendan Canning and Leslie Feist.

Mark Goldstein's profile page