C. A. Trypanis

Constantine Athanasius Trypanis or Konstantinos Athanasios Trypanis, Greek Κωνσταντίνος Αθανάσιος Τρυπάνης ( born January 22, 1909 in Chios, † January 18, 1993 in Athens ) was a Greek Byzantine Studies, Classical philologist, and poet Neogräzist Greek and English as well as Greek Minister of Culture and science.

Life

Trypanis began on the father's first request in Athens to study law, but then switches to classical philology and also studied in Berlin and Munich. After receiving his doctorate in 1937, he taught from 1939 to 1945 at the University of Athens. During the German occupation in World War II he fought in Chios Regiment. At this time his friendship goes back to the poet George Katsimbalis. 1947 went Trypanis as an assistant to John Mavrogordato to Oxford, in whose successor he was still appointed in the same year Bywater and Sotheby Professor of Byzantine and Modern Greek Language and Literature and a Fellow of Exeter College. In 1968 he accepted an appointment to the chair of Classics at the University of Chicago, but he was temporarily prevented by the Greek military dictatorship by refusal of a visa from exercising it. After his retirement in 1974, he was appointed by Constantine Karamanlis, as Minister of Culture and Science ( 1974-1977 ) back to Greece. From 1981 to 1985, he assumed the post of Secretary General of the Academy of Athens, which he was president in 1986.

Work

Trypanis worked at all periods of Greek literature. His first book was drafted in Greek examination to Theocritus, his philological main work is, however, edited together with Paul Maas first critical edition of Kontakia of Romanos.

His enthusiasm for poetry and the encounter with Katsimbalis led Trypanis also own poetic production, in his early years inspired in Greek, later, also by the friendship with Ian Fletcher and poetic circle in English. Theme of his poems was mainly Greek and Roman antiquity.

Writings

Text editions

• Sancti Romani Melodi Cantica. Vol 1: Canticles Genuina. - Vol II: Canticles dubia. Edited by Paul Maas and Constantine A. Trypanis. Vol 1: Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963, Vol 2: Berlin: De Gruyter, 1970.
• (Ed.): Fourteen early Byzantine cantica. Graz, Vienna, Cologne: Böhlau 1968 ( Wiener byzantinistische Studies, Vol 5)

Editions with translations

• (Ed.): The Penguin Book of Greek Verse. Introduced and edited by C. A. Trypanis. With plain prose translations of each poem. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books 1971
• (Ed.): Callimachus, Aetia, Iambi, Lyric Poems, Hecale, minor epic and elegiac poems and other fragments. Text, translation and notes by CA Trypanis - Musaeus, Hero and Leander. Introduction, text and notes by Thomas Gelzer, with an English translation by Cedric Whitman. Cambridge, Mass.:. Harvard UP 1958, reprinted with bibliographical addendum 1978 ( The Loeb classical library, 421)
• (Ed.): Sophocles, The Three Theban Plays. Warminster: Aris & Phillips, 1986, ISBN 0-85668-375-2

Monographs

• Greek poetry from Homer to Seferis. London [ ua]: Faber & Faber, 1981, ISBN 0-571-08346-3
• The Homeric epics. Warminster: Aris Phillips 1977, ISBN 0-85668-085-0

Editorial Boards

• (Ed., with Theofanis G. Stavrou ): Kostis Palamas - appreciation and a portrait of. Nostos Book, Minneapolis, Minn. 1985, ISBN 0-932963-00-5

Seals

• Pedasus: Twenty -four Poems, 1955
• The Stones of Troy, 1957
• The Cocks of Hades, 1958
• Pompeian Dog, 1964
• Groves in the Wind, 1964
• The Elegies of a Glass Adonis, 1967
• The Glass Adonis, 1972
• The Department of Special Collections of the University of Reading secures handwritten versions of unpublished poems and an unpublished theater piece.