re: The Brothers Karamazov--what translation?

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Having read Pevear / Volokhonsky it is hard to get past the super, ultra-mega annoying / almost incoherent sentence structure, and enjoy the book. Particularly a book that long. McDuff took greater liberty, so he loses exactness, but in so doing, he made it readable for native English speakers.

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I'd rather the first than the second. I mean, the Pevear translation isn't that bad. And I think the sentence structure, and particularly where the clauses break, are tremendously important for the Brothers K in particular, as they are some meters in the prose which are references to Pushkin and other poets. I mean, the first entrance of Dimitri Karamozov and his conversation with Aloysha either before or after the monastery scene contains quite a bit of tetrameter which is a direct reference to the Onegin Stanza used by Pushkin. That Dostoevsky took great pains in thinking about the music of the prose, and attempting it link it to Pushkin shouldn't be underrated. I thought the PV translation captured that subtlety better than other translations.