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I remember, when learning Russian and at the time reading the Master & Margarita very slowly and thoroughly and therefore remembering the first few pages very well, when killing time waiting for a bus I looked at the first page of 2 different translations in a bookshop.
I guess the lesson I took from it was a kind of "what do you actually 'see'?" when reading a text and to ask the question of how closely, kind of 'neatly', maybe 'sharply', and also perhaps with a similar chain of one image or concept to the next, i.e. the progression of it, the translation conveys the same.
I guess that sounds obvious, but I was struck by how one version clearly came closer than the other. Also I was struck by how there is a fact of how a foreign language will naturally convey the feel of the text in a different way to perhaps how the target language in translation would do so itself in 'normal use', and how nevertheless it seems nice, valid, maybe even necessary, to try and bring some of that over, despite temptations to use what might sound a little more usual in the target language.
Some translators seem to go very much for the most native-sounding result they can find, or perhaps the most 'economical', and this relates to the kind of sentence structure they create as well as words and phrases chosen, and then something of that vibe of the original disappears, which I remember I felt with both of those translations.
And, as to my first point, some seem to have not done enough of getting 'beyond' or 'deeper than' the words to what they are pointing at in meaning, and then little things are missed out, some small images or juxtapositions of ideas are missed or trimmed or some things are put in a slightly different light. Of course there's also the danger of getting 'beyond the words' into just the meaning and mood and changing things on the smaller scale to evoke what the translator feels in the bigger context. But then this fails too. At the level of discrete words and on larger and larger scales all of it needs to be kept as 'tight' as possible.
This reminds me of a comparison Milan Kundera did of translations of The Castle by Franz Kafka and the need to stay very faithful to the original author's language (I'll have to dig that out and read it again; I did in fact make myself translate the text he chose first to see how then I compared with the translations he critiqued).
Anyway, I would probably do little things a little differently to any translator here, but to me, having found the relevant passage in the original Russian text of Poor Folk and having read it a few times and then having compared it to the 4 translations above, the David McDuff version is a clear winner to me, the Constance Garnett one not too far behind in second place. I can maybe see reasoning in the last translation, but it doesn't follow the principle of keeping it as precise as possible also at the word level, seeming to look more to the bigger context and looking to flow nicely and economically to convey that, and all sorts of things are missing (and I'm not referring to the chunk of it the translator missed out, which maybe has been put afterwards or something; though maybe this is an abridged version, which could affect the translation too, beyond just cutting bits, and in that context maybe would be a good translation).
The Hogarth one has too much of what seems an attempt at stylising in English, and therefore again has nuances and colour deviating from the original. Of course, if we decide what translations are best, then we're setting ourselves up as the best translators ourselves, and there's always a point of view, but that's my view at least. I'll have to look at the Notes from the Underground translations later.
