What is your favorite translation of a classic?

What is your favorite translation of a classic? or a translation that you have read about and plan to read?

>1 Pharmacdon: I really like Richard Zenith's translations of Fernando Pessoa, particularly The Book of Disquiet. I otherwise like Margaret Jull Costa for Portuguese translations (Os Maias is a great one). I recently read a collection of Pushkin poems translated by Philip Nikolayev and I would definitely pick up another translation by him going forward.

There are so many English translations of non-English works I admire that I cannot select a favorite. But if I limit the question to cases where I can read the original language, then I'd say that James Michie's translation of Virgil's Eclogues stands out. (Michie produced the translation for the Folio Society edition in 2000, and he's translated lots of Latin poetry before.) Virgil's verse style is formal, sometimes deliberately artificial, but the content of the shepherds' conversation is often raucous and lewd. Michie gestures to the complexity of Virgil's syntax with hypotactic English, but he also achieves an apt conversational tone reminding us that these are shepherds speaking, albeit literary ones.

I have admired M. A. Screech’s modern translations of Montaigne’s Essays and Gargantua & Pantagruel. Other good translations are available for both, but Screech’s seem to flow more easily.