Escape From Banality
Tarnawsky was born in the Boiko region of Western Ukraine and for a long time was immersed in the Polish language. He studied German in an Austrian school, and that helped him grasp without difficulty Georg Trakl's lyric poetry, for example. He graduated from Ukrainian gymnasium in postwar Germany and specialized in electronics in the USA. In the arsenal of his practical linguistics are Russian (he is interested in Dostoyevsky and Gogol), French (he studies Rimbaud's poetry, the existentialism of Sartre, and translates Proust), perfect Spanish (he is fascinated by Neruda, Lorca, Machado, MЗrquez, and himself writes poetry in Spanish), not to mention English. He reads the works of Heidegger, Jaspers, Kierkegaard, Joyce, Rilke, Thomas Mann, T. S. Eliot, Camus, Derrida, and other giants of world culture, whose ideas he introduces into the context of his work, agreeing or disputing with them. Thus the writer was formed in "another" spiritual and cultural dimension, he has staying outside the confines of the archaic worlds of nationalism and socialist realism, that one way or another swallowed most of his colleagues from his native land.
The course of events in Tarnawsky's life has developed in such a way that, in his words, "high" Ukrainian literature, and even Shevchenko, did not leave the slightest trace in his works, unlike the folklore which stimulated the writer's imagination and made him think in metaphoric images. In his work Existence the writer confessed: "I came from the milky days of childhood - long, indefinite, fanciful - carrying in my hands the rosy flower of desire..." As a translator, he offered English-speaking readers the anthology, Ukrainian Dumy, immersing them in the world of Ukrainian folk poetry.
In his poems Tarnawsky utterly smashes the "harmony" and clichОs of the Ukrainian language, and instead of building his poems of already extant poetic building blocks he molds them in the clay of language. His figures are not traditional ("does anybody know of the pictures in my eyes?.."), for some they are rubbish and for others revelations. His surrealistic - even irrational - literature is for intellectual minorities. However, who knows where is the dividing line between intellectual and mass art?
Tarnawsky, like other members of the New York Group refused to plant cherry gardens and graceful poplars in American asphalt. The traditional emigration with its complexes and interest in certain subjects did not understand their "literary hooligans" (what decent person would write like Tarnawsky: "a naked woman lies between her side and arm..."?). In his autobiography Walking Home Barefoot the writer mentions that New York Group members expressed mainly personal feelings, intentionally avoiding patriotic subjects, because they felt that Ukrainian literature stayed aside from modern esthetic movements of the Western world, and it was their duty to change the situation. For them literary creation was not a form of hysteria but an escape from the banality of traditional boiled dumplings. It was not an escape from reality, though: later Tarnawsky wrote the post-Chornobyl poem U ra na, and the image of uranium-infected Ukraine was seared into the consciousness of his "beloved compatriots."
Valery Shevchuk is right, when asserting that for Tarnawsky poetry is the closest approximation to the very entity of the human soul, that while following world routes, the poet absorbed components of various cultures, drew Ukrainian poetry near foreign forms and extended the concept of the poetic in the world. Not so long ago, after meeting Hryhory Hlady at Lviv's Gold Lion Festival in November 1996, Tarnawsky started writing plays. He wrote the play, Hamlet "especially for Hlady", and last June in the New York's Toronado Theater Hlady directed another play by Tarnawsky, Not Medea. Recently the collection of the playwright's "classical Greek tragedies" entitled 6 x 0 was published in Kyiv.
The writer, open to everything modern, willing to create not in the past but in the present, is looking for new ways of artistic expression, and thus escapes from the triviality, for he wants to be a part of the multidimensional Universe:
Recently Tarnawsky promised to write something "decent" in "quite normal"
language. But can we really be expected to take this promise on trust?
