Andonis Manganaris-Decavalles

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Andonis George Manganaris-Decavalles (Greek: Αντώνης Γιώργιος Μαγκανάρης-Δεκαβάλλες; January 25, 1920 – June 9, 2008), known under his pen name of Andonis Decavalles, was a Greek-American poet and professor of literature. Described by M. Byron Raizis as "the outstanding poet of the Greek diaspora in America,"^[1] Decavalles published poetry, translations, and literary essays in a wide variety of American and Greek journals and was the author of 5 volumes of original poetry in Greek. A volume of his selected poems was translated into English by Kimon Friar. He authored Greek translations of T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets and the poetry of W. H. Auden, and he translated works of Greek writers into English, including Odysseus Elytis. In 1977 he was awarded the Academy of Athens Poetry Award for his book Armoi, Κaravia, Lytra [Greek: Αρμοί, Καράβια, Λύτρα; Joints, Ships, Ransoms], the first writer of the Greek diaspora to be so honored.^[2]

Decavalles is a poet in the modernist tradition. He came to prominence through his translation into Greek of Eliot's Four Quartets. He wrote his doctoral dissertation on another modernist poet who influenced Eliot, Ezra Pound. Among Greek poets, Decavalles was most influenced by Giorgos Seferis and Odysseus Elytis, both identified with the modernist movement. Decavalles's own poetry exhibits many of the main traits of modernism, according to translator and critic Kimon Friar.^[3] He plays with, or mixes, genres (as in his self-described "festive elegies"). He offers complex symbols for readers to ponder and interpret—a Greek trireme, a well, an urn. While his poems are deeply personal, in the lyric tradition, he engages the personal with larger issues and contexts. His poems do not confine themselves to formal structures, but in "the organic shape that each particular poem imposes on the poet," which "has more to do with the manipulation of images, meaning, and musicality than with deliberate structure"^[3]