Best translation of Pu Songling's Strange Stories From A Chinese Studio?

I'm doubting I'll get any answers for this.

But I've heard old chinese books are really hard to translate and that most if not all versions of this leave a lot to be desired. The amazon blurb for the 2 volume Ulan Press version sounds promising but the credited translator has a really bad reputation from some people.

There was a lil' discussion over on ILE in either the rolling Sinosphere or learning Mandarin threads, ah ... no, wait, it was the Chinese Classics thread. dylannn to thread? The Sidney Sondergard trans is the one I have access to and it's ... adequate? John Minford's pretty decent, so I'd imagine his translation for Penguin would be fine.

i'm not sure what i said the last time. did i say i have a copy of the people's china publishing edition? maybe. not the victor mair translation, but the new one. it's okay. i guess i'll cast my vote for minford.

old chinese books = books written in classical chinese + books written in vernacular chinese. classical chinese is maybe harder to render into pleasant english prose or maybe it's easier because there's no opportunity to get too literal... or maybe vernacular is easier because it's a modern, spoken and written language and far more accessible or maybe not.

i think the big problem with chinese-english translation from a casual readers perspective is a lot of it was done by academics without a great gift for writing in english or they were translated by nonnative english speakers or whatever. the pool of people that were translating chinese classics into english for most of the last hundred years or so were academics translating for academics or students of whatever, i think, so... yeah,, i think a lot of great works of chinese literature are sort of... no good translations yet.

strange tales has like 6 translations spanning a century, though, so

Thanks for your help. As I said, I really didnt think I'd get any response.

The recentish Penguin Classics edition (John Minford) was very good, though I have no way of comparing it against the original.