WCXX

No one seeking the fullest possible picture of the poet need go any further than Daniel Mendelsohn's exhaustive edition of his work. A Cavafy well suited for the 21st century emerges: Cavafy the geek. Mendelsohn has given himself the task of translating everything – the published poems, the unpublished poems, the poems that were published and then disowned, and, most excitingly of all for the Cavafy nerd, a clutch of unfinished, never published poems.

It turns out Mendelsohn is right. Cavafy is an even richer, more complex, wry and passionate poet than one might imagine from the widely anthologised greatest hits. We need to know just how much he hated the emperor Julian the Apostate, and why. Why he delved so deep into the past at the time of the war between Greece and Turkey (1919 to 1922); about the flagrant propaganda of Antony and Cleopatra. Both poet and editor are steeped in the ever more alluring world of Gibbon and Plutarch. With this edition of Cavafy, you come for the poems, and stay for the notes.

Mendelsohn is also excellent value in his introduction, in which he talks us through the technical challenges of translating Cavafy. Again, this is harder than English readers might think. Cavafy can be metrical, and can rhyme; he can swing from demotic to purified Greek, and normally straight back again. Mendelsohn's renditions can alert the English ear to some of these subtleties, but he doesn't always convincingly reproduce them.

Still, his translations of the poems Cavafy repudiated do a good job of conveying some of the stuffiness that damned them. And here, too, the notes do Cavafy a favour: just when you think you're going to read threnody after threnody to the lost beauty of flaneurs in their twenties (as if you're reading a sexed-up, Alexandrian version of A Shropshire Lad), there will be some anecdote from history, or note from the margin of Ruskin, to suggest some variety in the poet's inspiration. Mendelsohn's scholarship and sensitivity manage to persuade us that the poet's love of history can combine with this more immediate nostalgia, so that in the best poems it's impossible to separate the cerebral from the sensual.

None of this detracts from the consoling, calm voice we have come to know. In fact, among the unfinished poems – never before gathered together in English – is a poem called "Remorse", which will surely join more finished work in anthologies to come: "Don't cling to the past and torment yourself so much… The goodness that has brought you this remorse now / was secreted inside you even then." These lines have everything you could want from a poem. They are tolerant. They speak up for the little person. They pay some homage to the past, but are not enslaved by it. But there's something else. They're clever.

Complete Poems by CP Cavafy, tr by Daniel Mendelsohn

673pp, Harper Press, Telegraph offer price: £31.50 (PLUS £1.35 p&p) 0844 871 1515 (RRP £35, ebook £17.99)