Yuriy Tarnawsky, who turned 85 in February, is often seen as the epitome of avant-garde experimentalism – as a radical innovator whose commitment to the new is informed by the cosmopolitan atmosphere of urban America.
Born in 1934 in Turka, in southern Lviv Oblast, since his early years he went through a series of geographical and cultural displacements: from his birthplace in western Ukraine to a DP camp in southern Germany (via Austria), and later to the US, where he emigrated in 1952. When, at age 18, he settled in Newark, N.J., with his father and two siblings, he was eager to be part of the cultural environment of the United States. He engaged with enthusiasm with the new trends in Western literature, seeking his models in Existentialism, Surrealism and Arthur Rimbaud.
The notion that Tarnawsky’s literary experience developed in a particular moment in history – at the “coming of age of modernity,” in Theodor Adorno’s phrase – and in geography is crucial to a proper understanding of his style and evolution. It was in Germany that he first encountered the ideas of Existentialism, and it was New York – in particular the New York art world with its aesthetic provocations – that gave him direct access to the Western avant-garde. Young Tarnawsky escaped whenever he could from his home in Newark to New York, where he would read Sartre at the college library and spend hours at the Museum of Modern Art, wandering through Cubist and Dada works of art.
The originality of his poetic idiom owes so much to the ‘displacements’ of his early life and to the sense of ‘new beginning’ and self-(re)invention that was their legacy. “We had only ourselves to begin with”, he would later write in his memoirs, recalling his first steps in the literary arena. In New York, he met fellow poet and longtime comrade Bohdan Boychuk. He would be grouped with Boychuk, Bohdan Rubchak, Emma Andievska, Vira Vasylkyvska, Vira Vovk and Patricia Kylyna as the New York Group of poets, although many of them believed what they really had in common was living in New York.
Tarnawsky is not a man of one book: he relentlessly and successfully experiments with different genres and styles. Each of the books he published constitutes a “new beginning,” an attempt to usher in a breath of “fresh air” – to quote one of his early letters to Rubchak – in the literary microcosm of the Ukrainian diaspora.
His poetic debut, “Zhyttia v Misti” (Life in the City), which came out in 1956, is characterized by attention to everyday urban experience and a sense of cultivated “foreignness” in its mode of expression, above all the Hemingway-like clarity of his verse libre. The poems in the collection obey a dictum of soberness and concision, while giving poetic treatment to what traditional Ukrainian poetry used to conceive as utterly unpoetic: a young woman’s body is “as white as a piece of soap”; love is “banal, like a banana in my mouth.” The overall spontaneity of utterance – one that may descend from the poetry of Walt Whitman and Carlos Williams – is coupled by a proclivity for clarity of reason and intellectual meditation.
One of the central themes is the tyranny of modern life – with New York conceived as the archetypal alienating urban metropolis – and the influence it exerts over the individual, with its ghosts of solitude and isolation: “what is life, if not a building full of empty rooms?” The awe of modernity (its “accelerated grimace”) shapes the central oppositions of this collection: the organic against the lifeless; the individual against the crowd.
A sharp shift in the poet’s language and imagery is represented by the collections “Spomyny” (Memories, 1964) and “Bez Espanii” (Without Spain, 1967), which can be considered as different stages in the post-modern process of dispersion of the traditional lyrical subject. Inspired by Rimbaud’s “Illuminations,” “Bez Espanii” is a disjunctive and surreal text that uses avant-gardist techniques such as juxtaposition and collage to construct a reality where meanings are in constant flux.
The poems in this collection assault the reader with images of fragmentation and discontinuity that betray the modernist tenet that poetry, in T.S. Eliot’s phrasing, “must be difficult”: “Behind blood parallel to lime. Behind blankets parallel to blood. Behind teeth parallel to glass. Behind walls parallel to saliva. Behind legs parallel to cement. Behind cement perpendicular to blood” (“За кров, рівнобіжну до вапна. За простирала, рівнобіжні до крови. За зуби, рівнобіжні до скла. За стіни, рівнобіжні до слини. За ноги, рівнобіжні до цементу. За цемент, прямовисний до крови”).
In his next collection, “Ankety” (Questionnaires, 1969), the typically avant-garde critique of the lyrical dimension of poetry implies also a radical questioning of the epistemological status of the external object, which ceases to be conceived as a screen upon which the traditional Self projects its own desires.
A collection of 25 “questionnaires” exploring the identity of everyday objects such as a sink, a mirror, or a face, “Ankety” radicalizes the autonomy of the object vis-à-vis empirical reality, which then becomes a dry bundle of geometric lines: “The description should be limited by the following: the face is in front of the mirror and over the hands. To the right, squeezed in a distance between mirror and face (which means between hands as well) and infinitely far away from them there are landscapes” (“Опис доведеться обмежити слідуючим: oбличчя знаходиться перед дзеркалом і над руками. Праворуч, втиснені у відстань між дзеркалом і обличчям (і, тим самим, і руками) та безмежно далеко від них лежать краєвіди”).
In his aseptic treatment of things “as they are,” Tarnawsky clearly fits into Marjorie Perloff’s “other tradition” of Modernist poetry, the anti-symbolist mode that goes from Rimbaud (in some sense a catalyst for Tarnawsky) “to [Gertrude] Stein, Williams, [Ezra] Pound, by way of Cubist, Dada and Surrealist art.”
A further step in the anti-symbolist process of engaging with the surfaces of everyday objects is the collection “Poezii pro Nishcho” (Poems about nothing, 1970) which, at its very best, is about paying attention to minor details, to the unexpected depths of horror and despair glaring from the surface of things. Here Tarnawsky’s typical poetic strategy is to take a common object – a glass, a hand, a mouth – and de-familiarize it by rendering visual phenomena in an over-meticulous and ultimately grotesque way.
Thus an action as banal as opening one’s mouth is seen as a carrier of separation, fracture, and disharmony: “The mouth is permanently opening/like two trains/two of their parts permanently separate one from the other/as if only to be separate from themselves” (“Постійно відчиняються уста, як/два поїзди, дві/їхні частини постійно/віддаляються одна від одної/немов тільки/на те/щоб якнайдальше/бути віддаленими від себе”). “Poezii pro Nishcho” engages in a “negative mimesis,” focusing on the gaps, holes and absences constellating everyday reality. Its objects – a glass of water caught “in the tight triangle of the night,” “with no hands around it” – have a peculiar Heideggerian inflection: they come forth as beings and not as “instruments” available for human ends.
In the 1970s, Tarnawsky eventually decided to appeal to a larger audience of readers by publishing his work in English. In this respect, the very characteristics of the émigré literary market and readership made it impossible for the avant-garde writer to exist outside the system, except for crossing the border to another literary (and language) system. Tarnawsky’s transition to English is a form of bilingualism as well as of “biculturalism,” the creation of a new space of expression that transcends traditional boundaries and parallels his crossing of physical borders from an early age.
After “having a hard time having my [English] things accepted,” as he would somberly notice in a 1974 letter to an American friend, he published with the Brooklyn-based “Fiction Collective” the novels “Meningitis” (1978), ‘Three Blondes and Death” (1993), and the collection of mininovels “Like Blood in Water” (2007), and with JEF Books a collection of short stories “Short Tails” (2011) and “The Placebo Effect Trilogy” (2013), three collections of interrelated mininovels, which includes a revised version of “Like Blood in Water.”
Tarnawsky’s English-language prose develops the theme of the absurdness of everyday life in a style that is minimalistic and computer-like. The closest parallel is with the Nouveau Roman and Alain Robbe-Grillet’s experiments, the latter being a legitimate heir to the Pound-Williams “anti-symbolist line” and one of the major cultural references behind Tarnawsky’s “anti-subjective turn” of the 1960s. The 2014 collection of stories “Crocodile Smiles” extends further the “absurd” tendencies akin to Nikolai Gogol [Mykola Hohol] and Daniil Kharms developed in “Short Tails.”
This is, in the end, a poetry of withdrawal – withdrawal from the subject, and away from the future into the present – a tendency that can be seen as part of a post-modernist reaction to the towering aesthetic ambitions of Modernism. In the poem “A Man Dies” (“Cholovik vmyraie”) there are, nevertheless, verses that conjure the ultimate sense of poetry as a daring construct in the face of negativity, of non-being, of undoing: “Nearby, though behind/the wall, the stones continue/to blossom with their blossom,/which does not wither, but never/grows, and on the cracked /rock of the sky, a star is crawling/somewhere, red and/frail, like an ant” (Поблизу, хоч і за/стіною, каміння далі/цвіте своїм цвітом,/що не в’яне, але й не/росте ніколи, і на трісненій/скелі неба зоря повзе/кудись, червона/і квола, як мурашка). May Yuriy Tarnawsky and his literary art “blossom with their blossom” for a very long time.
Maria Grazia Bartolini is assistant professor of Ukrainian literature and medieval Slavic studies at the University of Milan. Her Ph.D. dissertation on Yuriy Tarnawsky’s poetry was published as a monograph under the title “Nello stretto triangolo della notte” (In the Tight Triangle of the Night) in 2012.