Ukrainian-American writer Yuriy Tarnawsky passes away

Yuriy Tarnawsky, a Ukrainian-American writer, translator, and one of the founding members of the New York Group of Ukrainian avant-garde authors, has passed away at the age of 91 on Oct. 14, 2025, according to his wife Karina.

Tarnawsky was a Ukrainian and US writer, translator, and cybernetic linguist. He co-founded the New York Group, an avant-garde association of Ukrainian diaspora writers; was a member of Fiction Collective, a group of American innovative writers; and co-founded and co-edited “New Poems,” a Ukrainian literary magazine published by writers in exile. Tarnawsky wrote in both Ukrainian and English, working in poetry, prose, drama, essays, and translation. His work has been translated into Azerbaijani, English, Hebrew, Italian, German, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Romanian, French, and Czech.

Born on Feb. 3, 1934, in Turka, Lviv oblast, his family moved to Germany in 1944 and later to the United States in 1952. In 1956, he began working at IBM in Poughkeepsie, New York, where he remained until 1992, first as an electronics engineer and later as a cyberneticist, developing automated translation between Russian and English.

While working at IBM, Tarnawsky pursued studies in theoretical linguistics at New York University, focusing on transformational-generative grammar. In 1982, he completed a PhD with a dissertation that explored the intersection of ideas by Noam Chomsky and Hilary Putnam, gaining recognition for his original approach to semantics.

Despite living outside Ukraine, Tarnawsky always considered himself Ukrainian, and continued to write in the language.

Tarnawsky’s literary career began in the 1950s, when he co-founded the New York Group (NYG), an association of Ukrainian modernists. In 1959, he and his colleagues launched the magazine “Novi Poeziji” (“New Poems,” 1959–1972). Later, while teaching at Columbia University, he helped create the NYG archive, where his texts are now housed.

He authored more than 20 books of poetry, prose, plays, and essays in both Ukrainian and English.

In Ukrainian, Tarnawsky published the collection “Bez nichoho” (“Without Anything,” 1991); the poem “U ra na” (“In Ra na,” 1992); the collection of plays “6×0” (1998); the volume of collected poems “They Are Not Here” (1999) and “Poems about Nothing and Other Poems on the Same Theme” (1970); as well as the volume of selected prose “I Don’t Know” (2000). His prose works include the novel “Shlyakhy” (“Roads,” 1961). Among his English-language works are the titles “Meningitis,” “Three Blonds and Death,” “Like Blood in Water,” and “Short Tails,” as well as the novel “Warm Polar Nights,” which was translated and published in Ukrainian (2019, Tempora Publishing House).

In addition to his own works, Tarnawsky translated literature between Ukrainian and several other languages, including English, German, and Spanish. Among his most prominent translations are Federico García Lorca’s play “The Love of Don Perlimplín and Belisa in the Garden,” and Samuel Beckett’s “Krapp’s Last Tape.”

In January 2008, Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko awarded Yuriy Tarnawsky the Order of Merit, Third Class, for his contributions to Ukrainian literature.

Since 1996, Tarnawsky has lived and worked in White Plains, New York.

According to publisher Marjana Savka, a volume of selected poems by Tarnawsky will be published by Old Lion Publishing House at the end of October 2025.

“This morning we learned that Tarnawsky passed away on Oct. 14. We were waiting for him to return to the Land of Poets festival and address us from the screen. But the Poet’s time on earth came to an end sooner than expected. Poets never die. They leave,” Savka wrote.

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Image: Oleh Holovatsky

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