Classics Without All the Class discussion

I'm currently meandering my way through Proust. This is my second attempt at Swann's Way and I'm finding Penguin's new translation by Lydia Davis far ore enjoyable than C K Scott-Moncrieff's.

Does anyone else have preferred translations/translators? Has a particular translation ever almost put you off a book you came to love? Any recommendations of preferred versions of your favourite translated works?

I'd love to get your thoughts!

One of my f2f book clubs is reading Anna Karenina; as facilitator, I examined four translations and agree with this Amazon blurb:

"While previous versions have softened the robust and sometimes shocking qualities of Tolstoy's writing, Pevear and Volokhonsky have produced a translation true to his powerful voice. This authoritative edition, which received the PEN Translation Prize and was an Oprah Book Club™ selection, also includes an illuminating introduction and explanatory notes. Beautiful, vigorous, and eminently readable..."

I found this article interesting: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archi...

"Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky have begun a quiet revolution in the translation of Russian literature. Since the publication of their acclaimed version of The Brothers Karamazov in 1990,12 they have translated fifteen volumes of classic Russian works by Dostoevsky, Gogol, Bulgakov, Chekhov, and Tolstoy, restoring all the characteristic idioms, the bumpy syntax, the angularities, and the repetitions that had largely been removed in the interests of “good writing” by Garnett and her followers, and paying more attention (in a way that their predecessors never really did) to the interplay or dialogue between the different voices (including the narrator’s) in these works—to the verbal “polyphony” which has been identified by the literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin as the organizing principle of the novel since Gogol."