biography

 

Yuriy Tarnawsky was born in 1934 in the town of Turka in Western Ukraine, at that time under Polish rule. His mother was a school teacher and father a principal.   His childhood years (1934-1939) were spent in Poland, near the town of Rzeszów, and then in Ukrainian ethnic lands, near Sanok and in Turka.   In 1944 he emigrated with his family to Germany.   After the war Yuriy Tarnawsky lived in a Displaced Persons' camp in Neu Ulm, Bavaria where he attended first Ukrainian and then German High Schools.   He graduated from High School in Munich in February of 1952, prior to emigrating with his family to the US and settling in Newark, NJ.   There he studied at Newark College of Engineering, from which he graduated in 1956 with a BS degree in Electrical Engineering.   Upon graduation, he joined the IBM Company and remained with it until 1992.   At IBM, Yuriy Tarnawsky worked at first as an electronic engineer and then a computer scientist, primarily on automatic language translation from Russian into English.   He managed groups of applied linguists at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, NY, in the US military school in Syracuse, NY, and at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC.   The program developed under his leadership was exhibited at the 1964 World's Fair in New York and was the first in the world to have a practical application.   During the years 1964-65, on leave from IBM, he lived in Spain.   Later, while continuing to work for IBM, he studied theoretical linguistics at New York University, obtaining a Ph.D. degree in 1982.   His doctoral dissertation titled "Knowledge Semantics," in the filed of transformational-generative grammar, deals with the semantic component within Noam Chomsky's Extended Standard Theory and argues against decompositional semantics.   After completing his linguistic studies, Yuriy Tarnawsky worked on computer processing of natural languages and the development of artificial ones as well as in the area of Artificial Intelligence, on Expert Systems.   For his work at IBM he received a number of awards. After leaving IBM, Yuriy Tarnawsky joined the staff of the Harriman Institute at Columbia University in New York and was professor of Ukrainian Literature and Culture in the Department of Slavic Languages as well as co-coordinator of   Ukrainian Studies (1993-1996).

Yuriy Tarnawsky is one of the founding members of the New York Group, a Ukrainian émigré avant-garde group of writers, and co-founder and co-editor of the journal Novi Poeziyi (New Poetry; 1959-1972).   His first volume of poetry Life in the City (1956, in Ukrainian), with its urban motifs and concentration on the theme of death, was received by critics as a new word in Ukrainian poetry, such that broke with the language and subject traditions of Ukrainian literature and laid down a path which many of his contemporaries were to follow.   The declaratively existentialist novel Roads (1961, in Ukrainian), which deals with the life of German youth in post-war Germany, is likewise considered a new word in Ukrainian fiction.   The roots of Yuriy Tarnawsky's early works lie almost exclusively in Western literature, in particular in Hispanic poetry and the poetry of the French presymbolists, surrealism, and the philosophy of existentialism.   With time, his technical and linguistic background began to exert more and more influence on his literary work, as a result of which it employs a radically new use of language, as for instance in the volumes of poetry Without Spain (1969, in Ukrainian) and Questionnaires (1970, in Ukrainian) and the novels Meningitis (1978, in English) and Three Blondes and Death (1993, in English).   In the 1960's Yuriy Tarnawsky switched fully to writing in English, first in fiction and then in poetry; although in the latter he subsequently made Ukrainian versions of the English-language works (the volume This Is How I Get Well (1978) and the next five collections).   He joined the group of avant-garde American writers Fiction Collective and published with it the novels Meningitis and Three Blondes and Death, which received high praise from US critics.

With Ukraine's independence, which came in 1991, Yuriy Tarnawsky returned to writing in Ukrainian, publishing literary works and articles in the press as well as separate books.   His works now show elements characteristic of postmodernism, such as polystylism, collage, pastiche, and the taking on of many, sometimes opposing, stances or masks (for instance, the poetry collection An Ideal Woman (1999) and the book-length poems U ra na (1992) and The City of Sticks and Pits (1999), as well as the cycle of plays 6x0 (1998), all in Ukrainian)).   This process culminates in the publication of a three-volume set of his writings in Ukrainian by the publishing house Rodovid -- 6x0 (1998, collected plays), They Don't Exist (1999, collected poetry 1970-1999) and I Don't Know (2000, selected fiction).

Yuriy Tarnawsky has devoted a lot of energy to translating from Ukrainian into English and from various languages into Ukrainian.

His works have been translated into French, German, Hebrew, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, and Russian.

In 1996 Yuriy Tarnawsky was a resident artist at the international writers' colony Ledig House, in upstate New York, where most of the plays comprising 6x0 were written, and in 1998 at Mabou Mines, the avant-garde New York theatre company, where the English-language version of his play Not Medea was staged in an experimental, laboratory production.   The same year his early play Four Designs for the Ukrainian National Flag was staged at the Ternopil Drama Theater, in Ukraine.   In 1997, the first four plays from 6x0 --The Boring Bitch of Despair, Female Anatomy, Not Medea, and Dwarfs -- received a public reading by actors of the drama studio of the National University of the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy in Kyiv.   Plays based on his poetry were likewise staged on numerous occasions by student theaters at the universities of Rivne and Ostroh, in Ukraine, during 1998-2004.   The 1994 film Journey into Dusk by the Ukrainian-American filmmaker Yuri Myskiw is based mostly on his poetry.