Yuriy Tarnawsky – poet, novelist, and co-founder of the New York Group of Poets – died on Oct. 14 at the age of 91 in his home in White Plains, New York. Born in 1934, in the western Ukrainian town of Turka, Tarnawsky was forced to flee his native land as a 10-year-old boy toward the end of World War II, during which his mother had died, and his father was away fighting at the front.
Tarnawsky attended school in Germany until 1952, when he emigrated with his father and siblings to the United States. In the US, he attended university and became a successful engineer and linguist responsible for IBM’s proto-AI language translator in the 1960s, commissioned by the US government to deal with Russian-language texts.
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On a parallel track, he wrote poetry in Ukrainian and established himself as a seminal figure in the Ukrainian avant-garde of the second half of the 20th century.
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Together with Bohdan Boychuk and others, he formed the New York Group of Poets, whose tacit mission was in part to let innovation and freedom flourish in Ukrainian literature, since it had been ruthlessly stifled by Joseph Stalin since the 1930s.
Later, Tarnawsky began writing poetry and prose in English, alternating between Ukrainian and English. He influenced younger generations both in the United States and Ukraine, including writers such as Serhiy Zhadan and Alex Averbuch.
Tarnawsky published some 40 books of fiction, poetry, drama, essays, and translations,
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His most significant works include: Life in the City (1956), Without Spain (1969), Poems About Nothing and Other Poems on the Same Subject (1970); his major fiction works are Three Blondes and Death (1993), The Placebo Effect Trilogy (2013), and Warm Arctic Nights (2019).
This year saw the publication of Extractions, selected poems in English. Later in the year, a selection titled Traje de luces, is due to be published in Ukrainian.
I first met Tarnawsky in 1991 and his writing – unlike anything I’d encountered in English or Ukrainian – quickly became an important waymark for me in the literary landscape of avant-garde New York. Toward the end of his life, I had the great privilege and pleasure of developing a friendship with the author.
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He was avid reader of Kyiv Post, following the war news with trepidation, and offered poems and commentary on a regular basis. An account of his work in relation to war, “Literary Insurgent,” was presented at New York’s Columbia University in 2023 and published by Kyiv Post.
Tarnawsky is survived by his devoted wife Karina and his daughter Ustya. His ashes will be buried in Bound Brook Cemetery in New Jersey.