The Psalter of David

Yannis Dallas was born in 1924 in Filippiada. He is a poet, a scholar of Modern Greek and a translator of works from ancient literature. He studied classical philology in Athens. He taught at secondary and higher education levels (as a professor at the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Ioannina and the Department of History of the Ionian University). He has published thirteen collections of poetry, the first ten of which are included in the comprehensive reissue "Poems 1948–1988" (Nefeli, 1990), whilst the subsequent three are: "Apothetis" (1993), "Identity Documents" (1999) and "Generators" (2004). Also a series of comprehensive studies ("The Creative Decade in Varnalis’s Poetry" and "Konstantinos Theotokis, A Critical Study of a Prose Career"), literary editions of Konstantinos Theotokis’s prose (Short Stories, The Slaves in Their Chains), of K. Varnalis’s anthologies (“Besieged Slaves” and “The Burning Light”) and of A. Kalvos’s works (“Odes”, “Ionia”, "The Psalms of David").

He also published two critical books on the subject of Kalvos’s poetics and classicism, and four others on the poetry of Cavafy (of which the most significant are: "Cavafy and History" and "Cavafy and the Second Sophistic"). Several essays dealing with themes and texts from early, interwar and post-war literature ("Observations I", 1954, "Transcendental Guild", 1958, "Oblique Discourse", 1989, "The Poet Miltos Sachouris", 1997, "Eurygonia", 2000, "Manolis Anagnostakis – Poetry and Ideology", 2000). In 2002, his book "Excavated Matter – From the Solomonic Mines" was published by "Agra" Press. He is also a prolific translator of the ancient lyric poets and the Alexandrian poets: "Ancient Lyric Poets" ("Choric Lyric Poets", "Melic Poets", "Elegiac Poets", "Iambic Poets"), Callimachus’s "Epigrams", "The Demotic Verses of the Ancients" and "Attic Symposia", 2001). He was honoured with the first State Prize for Criticism and Essay (1987) and the Grand Prize for Literature for his entire body of work (1999).