Si Guo (; 10 June 1918 – 8 June 2004) is the pen name of "Frederick" Tsai Chuo-tang (), a Chinese translator most active between the 1940s and 1970s.

Biography

Born in

Zhenjiang Zhenjiang, alternately romanized as Chinkiang, is a prefecture-level city in Jiangsu Province, China. It lies on the southern bank of the Yangtze River near its intersection with the Grand Canal. It is opposite Yangzhou (to its north) and b ...

, Cai came to Hong Kong in the late 1940s and worked as an editor at various organizations, including the Catholic weekly Kung Kao Po and the Chinese-language edition of '' Reader's Digest''. A devout Catholic, he also served as Professor of Chinese at the

Holy Spirit Seminary The Holy Spirit Seminary () is the seminary which is affiliated with the Roman Catholic Diocese of Hong Kong. Since its foundation in 1931 as the "Regional Seminary for South China" (), it has provided theological and pastoral formation to youn ...

. After migrating to the United States in 1971, he made frequent and long visits to Hong Kong and continued to publish locally. His body of work includes over 20 collections of essays, and close to a dozen translations of books from English to Chinese. For his work as an essayist, Tsai won the 1979 award for outstanding academic and literary publications from the Chungshan Cultural Foundation of Taiwan. His highly praised Chinese translation of the

Charles Dickens Charles John Huffam Dickens (; 7 February 1812 – 9 June 1870) was an English writer and social critic. He created some of the world's best-known fictional characters and is regarded by many as the greatest novelist of the Victorian e ...

novel '' David Copperfield'' was finished at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, where he was a visiting fellow in the late 1970s, and was awarded the prestigious Translation Award by the Cultural Promotion Foundation of the Taiwanese government in 1996. His series of books written on the art of translation are studied by students of translation, and often adopted as text books by the universities. Si Guo is remembered and beloved as one of China's best modern essayists. His most popular works include ''Collections on Flowers'' () (1976), ''Linju Bihua'' () (1979) and ''Autumn in Hong Kong'' () (1980).

References

{{authority control 1918 births 2004 deaths 20th-century Chinese translators 21st-century Chinese translators Writers from Zhenjiang Chinese emigrants to British Hong Kong