Giannis Dallas

Giannis Dallas was born in 1924 in Filippiada. He is a poet, modern Greek scholar, and translator of ancient literature. He studied classical philology in Athens and served in both secondary and higher education (as a professor at the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Ioannina and the Department of History at the Ionian University). He published thirteen poetry collections, with the first ten included in the comprehensive reissue "Poems 1948-1988" (Nefeli, 1990), and the subsequent three being "Apothetis" (1993), "Identity Elements" (1999), and "Generators" (2004). He also authored a series of comprehensive studies ("The Creative Decade in the Poetry of Varnalis" and "Konstantinos Theotokis, A Critical Study of a Prose Journey"), philological editions of the prose works of Konstantinos Theotokis (Short Stories, Slaves in Their Chains), the composite collections of K. Varnalis ("Besieged Slaves" and "The Light That Burns"), and the works of A. Kalvos ("Odes", "The Ionias", "The Psalms of David"). He published two critical books on the themes of poetics and Kalvos' classicism and four more on Cavafy's poetry (the most notable being "Cavafy and History" and "Cavafy and the Second Sophistic"). He wrote several essays on topics and texts from older, interwar, and postwar literature ("Supervisions A", 1954, "Transcendental Guild", 1958, "Oblique Speech", 1989, "The Poet Miltos Sachtouris", 1997, "Wide Angles", 2000, "Manolis Anagnostakis - Poetry and Ideology", 2000). In 2002, his book "Excavated Material - From the Solomonic Mines" was published by Agra. He is also a systematic translator of ancient lyric and Alexandrian poets: "Ancient Lyricists" ("Choral Lyricists", "Melic", "Elegiac", "Iambographers"), Callimachus' "Epigrams" and "The Popular Songs of the Ancients" and "Attic Symposiacs", 2001). He was honored with the First State Prize for Criticism and Essay (1987) and the Grand Prize for Literature for his entire body of work (1999).