“A Greek gentleman in a straw hat, standing absolutely motionless at a slight angle to the universe.” With this sentence the novelist E. M. Forster introduced the Alexandrian Greek poet Constantine Cavafy to the English-speaking world in 1919. Since then, Cavafy’s distinctive tone — wistfully elegiac but resolutely dry-eyed — has captivated English-language poets from W. H. Auden to James Merrill to Louise Glück. Auden maintained that Cavafy’s tone seems always to “survive translation,” and Daniel Mendelsohn’s new translations render that tone more pointedly than ever before. Together with “The Unfinished Poems” (the first English translation of poems Cavafy was still drafting when he died in 1933), this “Collected Poems” not only brings us closer to one of the great poets of the 20th century; it also reinvigorates our relationship to the English language.

When Dante wrote the poem we call “The Divine Comedy,” he called it simply the “Commedia”: a story, beginning in sorrow and ending in joy, of one man’s journey from hell, through purgatory, to paradise. It’s a good story. But while many of us are eager to harrow the halls of hell, with its gossipy tales of human suffering, few of us make it to heaven, where we are instructed in the theological intricacies of free will, gravity and the soul. No one said the journey was going to be easy.

But if the “Paradiso” is low on human interest (its inhabitants neither want nor regret anything), it contains some of the most exhilarating poetry even written. Recently, the poet Robert Pinsky offered us an English “Inferno”; W. S. Merwin translated the “Purgatorio.” Robert and Jean Hollander have made the whole journey: their “Paradiso” completes their verse translation of the entire “Commedia.”

Robert Hollander is one of the pre-eminent Dante scholars of our time. Each canto comes trailing notes of generous length elucidating the political, theological and cosmological aspects of Dante’s allegory. In addition, the translators refer to 73 commentaries compiled over the centuries and available at the Dartmouth Dante Project (dante.dartmouth.edu). But the “Commedia” is above all else a poem, and the Hollander translation obscures this fact — not because its scholarly apparatus is vast, but because the translation only fitfully succeeds as English poetry.